The Deadly Affair (1967) on Netflix
Charles Dobbs, a security officer, interviews Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan over an anonymous letter. Fennan dies soon after, and his widow Elsa, a camp survivor, may hold answers.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.7/104,796 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
An anonymous typed letter accuses Samuel Fennan, a Foreign Office official, of having been a Communist at Oxford. Charles Dobbs, who works for British intelligence, is sent to discuss it with him and finds him cordial company on a walk in a park. Soon afterward Fennan is found dead, apparently by his own hand. Senior officials are happy to let the matter rest, but Dobbs keeps coming back to details that do not add up, and he wants to question the widow, Elsa, who survived a Nazi extermination camp. Told to drop it, Dobbs asks Mendel, a police inspector about to retire, to make quiet inquiries. His own marriage is strained: his wife Ann has been unfaithful. Dieter Frey, an old friend Dobbs recruited after the war, is in London again.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Deadly Affair (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cinematographer Freddie Young pre-exposed the color negative to a small, controlled amount of light, known as "flashing" or "pre-fogging", to create a muted palette, and this film was the first to use it. Sidney Lumet called the result "colourless color", and Vilmos Zsigmond later used it on McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
- For the theater scene, a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Edward II, as directed for the stage by Peter Hall, was recreated at its real location, the Aldwych Theatre in London.
SPOILER
The film stayed fairly faithful to le Carré's novel, but the script added a romantic affair between Ann and Dieter and had the character Mendel shot at the climax, to provoke Dobbs's brutal beating of Dieter.
