Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Robert J. Maxwell The film opens in 1944 at an embassy affair in neutral Turkey. The German ambassador, von Papen, slips out of the ballroom where the soprano is carrying on about the ride of the Valkyries, remarking, "Wagner makes me sick," and chats with Danielle Darrieux, a wealthy French countess who has been chased from France to Poland to England by falling bombs. She pleads with von Papen for money. She'll do anything to regain her estate and its treasures. She can be very beguiling. She can be a spy. Von Papen excuses himself politely and leaves. Another guest is standing nearby, eyeballing Darrieux. She sneers a little and tells him, "Please, don't stand there staring at me as if you were worth more than your salary." Good old, literate Joseph Mankiewitz, the writer and director who gave us "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride." Most of the good lines are given to James Mason as the British Ambassador's valet in Ankara. Valets, like most servants, are given what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "non-person treatment." They're regarded as items of convenience of pieces of furniture, and they know enough to keep family secrets. Mason, as "Cicero", his code name in German Intelligence, knows enough to keep family secrets too. He also knows enough to get the combination to the embassy's safe, remove valuable documents, photograph them, and sell them to German agents, no matter how dubious those German agents might be. They continue to suspect that he's a British double agent and they fail to act on his information, even the time and place of the D-Day landings on Normandy.There are several double crosses, which I won't describe in detail. When Mason has all the money he thinks he needs to live like a gentleman in Rio de Janeiro with his former employer, Darrieux, as his mistress, she runs off to Switzerland with all the dough. And when Mason finally reaches Rio and stands on his veranda in the evening breeze, drinking high-falutin' wine, an incident takes place that I don't believe because I think it may have been ripped off from "The Lavender Hill Mob." In the end it's a tale of morality. The moral is: Make sure you pay your charwoman enough so that she doesn't take a Minox camera to the material you've stashed in the family vault.

irvberg2002 The fictionalized aspects of the story are what give it the most zing. The actual spy, one Elyesa Bazna, was detected as the result of the disclosures of an allied spy who was an official in the German foreign ministry, one Fritz Kolbe (for the story about him, see "A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich" by Lucas Delattre), who provided Nazi documents to Allen Dulles in Bern, who, in turn, notified the British that their Ankara embassy was compromised. A couple of British security agents were sent to the embassy, where they changed the safes and their combinations. Their visit was made to appear normal and routine; neither Cicero nor the Germans ever knew what led to it and Cicero was put out of business well before Overlord was in play. Bazna wrote his own book, "Ich War Cicero", published in Munich in 1964.

edwagreen Never trust women. You certainly can't trust the Nazis.The ending in this film comes right out of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.The film is definitely a taut espionage thriller with James Mason playing a butler in the British embassy who is up to his neck in espionage. Seems he used to work for the Polish Countess Waleska (Danielle Dariux) until the bombs started falling on Poland and the count had nerve enough to die.The two of them form a relationship where Mason steals top documents for the Nazis, and is paid well. Of course, the Nazi hooligans never trust him and eventually the film becomes one of who will do him in-England or Germany?Michael Rennie plays a British agent. Surprising that it takes so long to see what's going on here.This is the ultimate film in deception and duplicity. I can't give it away but Mason, as Cicero, the spy certainly has an ironic last laugh.

Neil Doyle FIVE FINGERS is one of the better espionage movies that came out in the '50s, a post-war film that contains a wonderful central performance by JAMES MASON, an excellent script and fine direction from Joseph L. Mankiewicz. TCM was presenting it as a tribute to Bernard Herrmann, who contributes his background score to the film--a minor work, in my opinion, not as stirring as the scores he would later write for his collaboration with Hitchcock.It's the taut script that supplies all the suspense and the performances of an expert cast. DANIELLE DARRIEUX is assured as the greedy Countess who decides to go along with Mason's offer of assisting him in his little enterprise with the Germans so that she can acquire the wealth to which she is accustomed, rather than remain penniless. It's their relationship that leads to the stunning twist ending.There are clever touches in the screenplay that will have the viewer on the edge of the seat as Mason almost gets caught time after time, but is able to use his wits at all times to avoid capture. The satisfying ending is quite unpredictable and seems to be manufactured in order to add some zest to the spy story--but that's no matter.Mason was at the top of his form, using his voice and suave, debonair charm as an English gentleman who happens to be a very astute spy while working as a valet at the British Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. MICHAEL RENNIE is fine as the American agent assigned to find out who is stealing "Top Secret" WWII plans for defeating the Germans. The last half-hour deals with his attempts to track down and capture Mason once he is aware that he is the culprit.Fascinating spy yarn deserves to be seen as one of the best of its kind with an ironic ending.