Thank heavens these spies come in from the cold -- it's frozen their brains.

Hutton succumbs firstly to a thin role, and secondly to the film's lack of any strong viewpoint about its leading men. As usual Schlesinger is more than half in love with what he might be satirising.

It is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naivet, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

... brilliantly shows how the protagonists’ equally idealistic, yet differing sense of self can lead them to be heroes and villains in the same instance...