Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema uncovers Hitchcock as the real spymaster

Kermode surveys the spy genre in the concluding part of his BBC Four series  
David Sexton2 April 2020

Just a month ago, the postponement of the release of the new James Bond film, No Time to Die, originally planned for tomorrow, was one of the earlier signs about how much that had been scheduled and anticipated for this year was going to be made impossible by the coronavirus.

It’s now due for its mega-release on November 12. We’ll see. Or not. Meanwhile, here’s the concluding part of the second series of Mark Kermode’s excellent survey of different cinema genres, clearly pegged to the Bond release but in no way left stranded by its deferment.

Kermode, rather remarkably the film critic for both BBC Radio 5 Live and The Observer, has far more mainstream taste than other movie writers equivalently knowledgeable (his list of 10 favourites begins with The Exorcist, not Au Hasard Balthazar) and he is extremely good at sharing his expertise without any airs.

Explaining the purpose of the first series of Secrets of Cinema in conversation with Kermode, his co-writer Kim Newman characterised their approach as “know-it-all obnoxiousness”. It’s the exact opposite: genial knowledgeability.

007 James Bond: Films - In pictures

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They’re part lecture, part anthology — often at the same time, because the screen is split between Kermode talking on one side and a clip from the relevant film on the other, almost like the two pages of a picture book opened before us.

There’s no overstretched argument, plodding history or excessive theorising, the programmes instead being loosely structured around common themes (the super-spy, villains, the great escape). Tonight Kermode tells us that two of his favourite films from the last 10 years have been Skyfall and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and he comes back repeatedly to them as reference points.

We also get as much as we’re permitted, for the duration, of No Time to Die, notably the scene, included in the trailer, in which the antediluvian Bond is surprised to find that a woman, “Nomi” (Lashana Lynch), has been an 00 agent for two years.

007 James Bond 25: Daniel Craig filming 'No Time To Die'

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She tells him: “So stay in your lane. You get in the way, I will put a bullet in your knee — the one that works.” No wonder Daniel Craig wants out.

Yet for all this Bonding, the clear takeaway is that the great creative master of the genre remains, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, with his ever acute “sense that the world was hostile, that no one, especially women on a train, could be trusted”.

A scene from North by Northwest (1959) played on a split screen alongside one from From Russia with Love (1963) shows not just the embarrassing similarity but the evident inferiority of early Bond.

Not everyone loves him, you know. Evelyn Waugh, taken to the 1962 premiere of the first film, Dr No, by Ian and Ann Fleming, thought it “absolutely awful — fatuous & tedious, not even erotic”.

More to the point, the extracts from other great Hitchcock spy thrillers — Sabotage, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Saboteur, Notorious —make you want to see all these films again immediately, so exemplary, so genre-defining, they seem.

This show was obviously completed in the time before lockdown, so Kermode doesn’t suggest it — but there’s an appealing project for the weeks, perhaps months, ahead, while waiting for the big releases to return.

Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema: Spy Movies airs tonight on BBC Four at 9pm