Man on a String (1960)

Strong and Moving!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Perhaps Borgnine is not the very first name that would come to mind when casting a film about a Russian spy who is coerced into working as a double agent, yet here he is, enjoying his brief tenure as a leading man in the wake of his Oscar win for "Marty". He plays a Russian-born Hollywood film producer (inspired somewhat by a real life man who was in the music end of the film business) who has been goaded into passing on secrets to the Communists in order to save the lives of his father and brothers who remain in the USSR. He is discovered by young agent Corbett (here referred to as working for the CBI, but clearly meant to be the FBI) and is convinced to work both sides in order to avoid being executed for his crimes. This involves his flying to West Berlin and commuting between the free world and the Iron Curtain in an effort to uncover the latest Communist plot against the US. Meanwhile, his American cohort Matthews tries to ensure his safety and fellow red spies Prentiss and Dewhurst work on exposing him in order to save their own necks. The sometimes-pedestrian plot is amped up near the end by a tense arrest and escape attempt filmed amid the ruins of the Berlin border. Borgnine tries hard to convey his character's torment and untenable situation, but the fact remains that he is miscast. Matthews is nice-looking and gives a decent performance, but is fairly colorless. It's quite a shock to see slim, youngish Dewhurst, who is very different from the woman most people recognize from her later TV, stage and film work. She does well here, yet hadn't completely accumulated the throaty tones in her voice, which would later make her voice so distinctive. Joloff, who plays a Soviet leader, has his voice very obviously dubbed by Paul Frees. There's also a very annoying narrator who feels the need to dryly state the obvious. He is relieved occasionally by Borgnine, who should have been permitted to provide whatever narration was deemed necessary by the producers. The ridiculous spy training academy pictured in the film almost takes this into parody with obviously American people playing Russians trained to behave like Americans. (This idea was ripped off by "Mission: Impossible" in its first season.) Check out the VERY abbreviated swimwear on the German men in some of the stock footage used. Some dancing girls also appear in a nightclub and they seem to have on bottoms about a size or two too big and aren't exactly the most coordinated Terpsichoreans ever seen. There are a few decent sets and a couple of well-handled location shots, but the budget does appear to be low for this one. It winds up being a capable, but unremarkable, programmer with precious little to distinguish it.

***SPOILERS*** Somewhat far fetched Cold War drama with Earnest Borgnine playing the very reluctant Hollywood film producer and double agent Boris Mitrov who's manipulated by both sides The USA and Soviet Union to do their dirty work. Boris had been suckered into helping his native country the Soviet Union by Col. Vadja Kubelov, Alexander Scourby, the first secretary to the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C in the promise that it would help him have his father Papa Mitrov, Vladimar Sokoloff, and brothers giving free passage to the United States.During Boris' involvement with Kubelov & Co. he's been watched by the CIB or CIA who've been following his every move. The CIB needing to get someone inside the Soviet Union to infiltrate it's spying apparatus sees in Boris the perfect pasty who with his dealing with the Soviet here at home can only go along with them or else face life imprisonment or worse. Meanwhile Boris' Soviet handler Col. Kubelov want's him, as repayment for having his father released from a Soviet work camp, to sell out his film production company to millionaire and undercover communist Adrian Benson, Ed Prentiss, in order to have him secretly make subversive and pro Soviet movies to brainwash the American public.Things start to get very complicated when Boris, who was ordered by his now CIB controllers, goes to West Berlin to make a documentary and use it as cover to get himself into the Soviet Union to work for it's KGB as a spy against the United States. Taken in by the Moscow KGB chief Gen. Chapayen, Friedrick Joloff, as one of his newest and brightest discoveries Boris in no time at all memorizes every Soviet agent in the United States, which numbers in the thousands. Boris' cover is soon blown when Benson finds out that his house had been bugged by the CIB and together with his wife Helen, Colleen Dewhurst, makes a run for it across the US/Mexican border.Benson who was allowed to escape by the CIB, so his arrest wouldn't blow Boris's cover in the USSR, get's to Moscow via East Berlin and desperately tries to get in touch with Gen. Chapayen to alert him that Boris is rally a double agent. Boris who was informed by friend and CIB agent Avery, Kerwin Mathews, that the jig was up and told to check out of the country and take a plane to East Berlin and then make it to the US controlled west before he's caught and shot on the spot by the KBG as a US spy.Just when you, and Boris, think that it's all over it's then when the action really starts with Boris on the run all over the communist controlled city trying to make it back to West Berlin and both safety and freedom. Doing a James Bond bit three years before James Bond was ever introduced to the movie going public Boris gets away from an East Berlin policeman shooting him dead with a secret cyanide dart gun and then crosses back into West Berlin only to find out that the East Berlin secret police are there waiting for him.The ending was just too much to take with Boris running around handcuffed being chased by communist agents in the middle of US controlled West Berlin with not a single US, as well as West German, soldier or police official coming to his aid. Unbelievable and outlandish shoot-out, again with on one in the city coming to their aid, at the CIB headquarters with Boris taking matters into his own hand by cold cocking the chief communist agent with his handcuffs; this after Avery and his fellow CIB agents ended up getting shot and killed by the communist agents.Boris by getting the names and addresses, that he kept only in his head, of thousands of Soviet agents all over the United States wrecks the entire Soviet spying network that it's so painfully nurtured over the last fifteen years. In the end Boris get a commendation for his services from the US congress and his involvement with the Soviet Union is forgotten about since he did it to help his family members not the Soviets. As for Boris' bothers back in the USSR it's fond out, from pop Mitrov himself, that they actually died in a Siberian prison camp and were being used, in Boris being told that they were alive, by Col.Kubelov to keep Boris in line and under the KGB's and Soviets control.

Based on the real life story of Boris Morros who was a musician instead of a film producer, Man on a String comes at the tale end of the Cold War espionage thrillers where there was absolutely no doubt as to who the good guys and bad guys were on the screen.I can understand the reason for renaming the lead character that Ernest Borgnine plays Boris Mitrov and changing his occupation even, for dramatic purposes to give the character more scope. But for the life of me was anyone fooled when the agency he worked for was renamed the Central Bureau of Intelligence? Borris Morros has his own page on IMDb and you can see the rather astonishing list of film credits he had, working on the scoring of a whole lot of films, some of them classics like Stagecoach. His own life gives a lie to the notion that there were no Communists in Hollywood. The blunderbuss approach taken by the House Un-American Activities Committee is another issue altogether.The Mitrov character we see here isn't exactly stealing the atomic secrets, in fact he's not really doing any spying at all so to speak. As the Russian agent says, all they're doing with him is buying his good name to gain entrée into other places.Our own CIA knows that and turns him into a double agent where he does perform useful work in identifying Soviet agents here. In real life it wasn't quite as dramatic as shown in Man on a String.One thing that is of interest is that Man on a String, made as it was in 1960 in the wake of Nikita Khruschev's boast about how he would bury America. That is their attitude, that victory for them was inevitable because Marx said that's how history was flowing. It's interesting to watch this film now in the light of the fall of the Soviet Union. And it fell because it's economy couldn't keep spending militarily and provide its citizens with basic necessities.Man on a String is a Cold War relic, but interesting viewing nonetheless.

These sort of espionage stories are not favorites of mine unless done with a storyline that is not too convoluted, as is sometimes the case in these kind of spy thrillers. But if they're taut and suspenseful throughout, I can forgive too many complications. Fortunately, the cat-and-mouse game played here is understandable enough and crackles with suspense and tension.MAN ON A STRING is a spy thriller based on the true-life adventures of a real counter-spy Boris Morros (dubbed Boris Mitrov here), played by ERNEST BORGNINE. While the plotting is far from simple, it's easy enough to enjoy the air of menace and danger that permeates the entire story without getting bogged down into the details of entrapment that always accompany these spy stories.It moves at a brisk pace under the direction of Andre deToth (for awhile, he was a husband of Veronica Lake in the '40s), and all of it is filmed on locations in East and West Germany. KERWIN MATTHEWS is Borgnine's fellow spy assigned to guide him through the various activities, COLLEEN DEWHURST does well in her second film after a couple of TV roles, and GLENN CORBETT is excellent as a government agent.It's rather talky for the first hour and then builds to a tense climax among the deserted buildings of East Germany when Mitrov's activities become known to the Russians, which leads to a shootout scene that caps the ending in a satisfying and suspenseful way.Borgnine gives a solid performance and the film itself is well worth watching.There's a narration that gives it an almost documentary approach, somewhat like another film produced by Louis De Rochemont, THE HOUSE ON 92nd STREET.Summing up: Crisp, exciting spy thriller.