Where the original play was long and more meditative, making suspension of disbelief at least possible, here it just seems like nonsense.

A well-acted, literate but insufferably smug little movie that fictionalizes the life of Guy Burgess, who with Donald Maclean defected to Moscow in the early 1950's.

If you can get past the wacky premise—that the British public school system is the direct cause of (a) homosexuality and (b) communism—what remains is a dull, conventionally carpentered melodrama, a natural for miniseries expansion by PBS.

The wit is sophisticated, dry, and underplayed.