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Even for a conspiracy thriller, Defence of the Realm (1985) is an uncomfortable film. Its newsroom seems wrapped in a clingfilm of nicotine, its night scenes suffused with the surreal ultramarine that blurs dusk into dawn, its streets and offices as fox-fired with fluorescence as if faintly decaying throughout. An airbase glows as suddenly out of a darkness of fenland as science fiction. Precisely because no one can be seen in it, a window becomes a threat. It is not a sound or a secure world to inhabit and yet because it is ours, its characters walk on our own plain air of pretense, behaving as if its tips and headlines can be relied on until all at once the missed footing of a microcassette or a photocopy becomes an abyss and the most accustomed institutions nothing to hang on to after all. It came out of a decade whose mistrust of its government was proliferating through public discourse and art and felt neither safely transatlantic nor old-fashioned when I first learned of the film, twenty years ago when top-down lies about weapons of mass destruction were particularly au courant. Forty years after its release, its anxieties over the exercise of unaccountable power within a superficially democratic state haven't aged into a fantasy yet.

As a conspiracy thriller, it is not an especially twisty one, which works for rather than against its escalation from tabloid expediency to an open referendum on the British security state; it has one real feint in the juicy hit of its Profumo-style affair after which it can let itself concentrate on the unnerving, bleak, inevitable revelation of a world whose dangers spring not from the rattled skeletons of the Cold War but the actorly handshakes of the Special Relationship. We hear a bulletin on the bombing of the American embassy in Ankara before we see the titles that set the isolated scene of a car speeding down a night-misted road somewhere in the sedge flats of "Eastern England." Further overlays of current events will come to sound more like the Lincolnshire Poacher than Channel 4, a wallpaper of committee hearings and police reports pinging their transmissions among the paranoid legwork of blow-ups and coil taps. "Clapping eyes on it is one thing. Getting a copy out is another. " The flame of truth in this film is more like one of those old incandescent bulbs that take a second or two to sputter on, dust-burnt and bug-flecked. For a while it seems not just carried but incarnated by Vernon Bayliss, one of the rumpled nonpareils of 1980's Denholm Elliott—nothing but the rigs of the Thatcherite time explains what his old leftie is doing as the veteran hack of a right-wing rag like the Daily Dispatch, but it's a riveting showcase for his voice that crackles with cynicism while the rest of his face looks helplessly hurt, his disorganized air of not even having gotten to the bed he just fell out of, a couple of heel-taps from a permanently half-cut Cassandra of the Street of Shame. "Vodka and Coca-Cola! Détente in a glass." His inability to drink his ethics under the table and accept the gift-wrapped stitch-up of the Markham affair may be a professional embarrassment, but it gives him a harassed dignity that persists through his cagily tape-recorded conversations, his blatantly burgled flat, his obsessive spiraling after something worse than a scoop, the facts. "Oh, well," he snarls with such exasperated contempt that the cliché sounds like another shortwave code, "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." It makes his successor in the threads of the conspiracy even more counterintuitive and compelling, since just the CV of his byline establishes Nick Mullen as the kind of ingeniously shameless journo who never has yet. Gabriel Byrne looks too wolfishly handsome for an ice-cream face, but he has no trouble passing himself off as a plainclothes copper in order to upstage the competition with an extra-spicy soundbite gleaned from an all-night stakeout and a literal foot in the door. His neutrally converted flat looks barely moved into, its mismatched and minimal furnishings dominated by the analog workstation of his deep-drawered desk with its card file and telephone and cork board and typewriter, a capitalist-realist joke of a work-life balance. Whatever he actually believes about the exposé he's penned with everything in it from call girls to CND, it comes an obvious second to drinks with the deputy editor and being let off puff pieces about the bingo—fast-forwarded four decades of slang, Nick might say in line with his corporatized, privatized generation that caring is cringe. "Give me a break. You know how it is. It's a bloody good story!" And yet because he's not too successfully disaffected to show concern when a mordantly ratted Vernon raises a belligerent glass to his shadow from Special Branch, in little more than the time it takes to jimmy open a filing cabinet he will find himself not merely retracing his older colleague's steps but telescoping through them, the real story coming in like a scream of turbines and terrifyingly so much less clandestine than it should have had the decency to be. Le Carré is invoked with debunking condescension, but it is just that chill of his which pervades this film whose obscured, oppressive antagonist is not a foreign power or a rogue agent or even a sinister corporation but the establishment itself, blandly willing to commit any number of atrocities to contain a scandal that goes considerably further than the death of a young offender or the indiscretions of a former chairman of the Defence Select Committee. The old scares still work when Vernon's integrity can be questioned with the reminder of his Communist youth, but the cold isn't coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain: if you can't see your breath in Whitehall, you must not be looking. Hence the warmest character on this scene is its most disposable and its antihero in ever greater danger as he makes not only the tradecraft connections of collated data, but the human ones of outrage, trust, and shame, learning to shiver as he goes, but fast enough? His faith in his own disillusion is touchingly unequal to the pitiless weirdness of the tribunal of nameless civil servants who cross-question him like judges of the underworld in triplicate before turning him loose into a night so vaporous and deserted, its traffic lights blinking robotically in the mercury sheen, it seems that in the ultimate solipsism of conspiracy Nick has become the one real person in all of London. After all, a state need not kill if it can atomize, terminating communication either way. "The only person who knew the answer to that question was Vernon."

Originating as a screenplay by Martin Stellman who already had the anti-establishment cult non-musical Quadrophenia (1979) under his belt and directed by prior documentarian David Drury, Defence of the Realm had grounds for its nervous clamminess even before the photography of Roger Deakins, who gave it a color scheme which tends even in natural light toward the blanched or crepuscular and a camera which monitors its subjects from such surreptitious telephoto angles—when it isn't jostling against them like an umbrella in a crowd—that no closed-circuit, reel-to-reel confirmation is required for it to feel unsafe for them to be captured on film at all. "Age of Technology, eh?" Nick remarks affectionately, rescuing Vernon from the poser of the portable tape recorder. "You haven't even caught up with the Industrial Revolution." Suitable to its techno-thriller aspects, the film is as mixed in its media as parapsychological sci-fi, but whatever pre-digital nostalgia the viewer may feel toward an Olympus Pearlcorder S920 or a Xerox machine should tap out at nuclear-armed F-111s. "R.A.F. Milden Heath, Home of the 14th Tac. Fighter Wing U.S. Air Force" hardly needs the geographical triangulation of Brandon and Thetford to translate it into RAF Lakenheath where two separate near-accidents involving American nukes on British soil really had, in 1956 and 1961, occurred. Only the first had been officially acknowledged at the time of the film's production and release. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was still in full protest, the American nuclear presence a plutonium-hot, red-button issue; it was no stretch to imagine another incident kicked under the irradiated carpet at all costs. The film's more disturbing skepticism is reserved for the trustiness of its hot metal news. Its portrait of the fourth estate is not wholly unaffectionate, especially in cultural details such as the racket of a banging-out ceremony in the composing room, the collage of pin-ups in the stacks of the manila-filed morgue, or even the pained groan with which Bill Paterson's Jack Macleod observes the disposal of a cup of cold coffee: "Aw, Christ, what did that geranium ever do to you?" The Conservative sympathies of the paper, however, are flagged on introduction as its senior staff slam-dunk the character assassination of a prominent opposition MP and it is eventually no surprise to find its owner in more than tacit collusion with the faceless forces of the security services, considering his side hustle in defence contracting. "The man's into the government for millions . . . They build American bases. Can't jeopardize that, old son." It is not just the individual journalists in Defence of the Realm, but the entire concept of a free press that seems fragile, contingent, compromised. For all its triumphal, classical headline montage, the film goes out on a note of thrumming ambiguity, whether the conspiracy will perpetuate itself through its own media channels, whether everything we have seen lost will be worth the sacrifice or merely the valiant humanity of trying. These days I would be much more hostile to the magical thinking of a secret state except for all the authoritarianism. Move over, Vernon, even if both halves of your favorite beverage would try to kill me. "It's a free country. I think."

Denholm Elliott won his third consecutive BAFTA for Defence of the Realm and deserved to, stealing a film so three-dimensionally that his exit leaves the audience less twist-shocked than bereft: what a waste that he and Judi Dench never played siblings or cousins, their cat's faces and wide-set jasper eyes. Ian Bannen appears even more sparingly as Dennis Markham, but he only needs to be remembered as Jim Prideaux to trail that cold world in with him. As his PA, Greta Scacchi's Nina Beckman is self-possessed, unimpressed, and it feels like a mark of the film's maturity that she does not fall into bed with Nick when he's of much more use to her as a partner in counter-conspiracy, meeting on the red-railed Hungerford Bridge where we cannot tell if the reverse-shot pair on the concrete arches of Waterloo Bridge should be taken as tourists, commuters, more of the surveillance apparatus that feels so very little need to disguise itself. It is not faint praise that Gabriel Byrne thinks convincingly onscreen, especially when Nick gives an initial impression of cleverness rather than depth. I can respect the way he lives in the one tweed jacket down to falling asleep in his car in it. After two decades of keeping an eye out, I pounced on this film on Tubi despite its rather disappointingly scrunchy transfer and enjoyed it in much better shape on YouTube. Whatever else has dated of its technologies and mores, I have to say that a distrust of American nuclear capacities sounds healthy to me. This détente brought to you by my industrial backers at Patreon.