Shameless slide into slick trash

CINEMA
Clive Fisher
I WONDER how we shall remember the 1980s? The glorious Thatcher years, the royal weddings, Greenham Common, AIDS, Peter Wright's remote antipodean battle for truth as he sees it against the British government? Not all of these phenomena will have fallen into oblivion 13 years hence; and it is safe to assume that certain aspects of The Fourth Protocol (Odeon. Leicester Square, '15') will occasion a stirring of nostalgia when the film is shown in some forlorn repertory cinema, if such things still exist at the century's end.
Protocol is based on Frederick Forsyth's novel of the same name (a novel f had never heard of, though I am sure it has sold in its millions); and its author formed a production company with his friend Michael Caine in order to ensure what he considers the veracity and authenticity of his project.
And various aspects of the film do bear the stamp of feasibility. The British, more than any other nation in modern times, have made an institution of intelligence agencies as schools for scandal. As Peter Wright prepares to publish his account of the corruption of M15, The Fourth Protocol's study of collusion between Whitehall and the KGB has great topicality; and the film's scenes of peace demonstrators echo what for years has appeared on television news. (Certain forms of contemporaniety can, however, be unfortunate: when I saw the film the other day, the cinema reverberated with uneasy laughter as a TownsendThoresen ferry sailed across the screen.) The Fourth Protocol is a clause to a nuclear nonproliferation treaty signed by America, Russia and Britain in 1968. Certain mandarins of the KGB and certain mavericks within MI5 dislike the relative stability such treaties foster and they devise Plan Aurora, a scheme to assemble and detonate a warhead on an American airbase in Britain and thus engender a swell of antiAmericanism which will cause the Europeans to expel their American protectors and cripple NATO irrevocably: It is, I suppose, still plausible. But I wearied of the cliched and obvious treatment of the material.
In the frozen wastes of Russia (Northern Finland doing a reasonable imitation), the KGB's top agent, Major Petrofsky (Pierce Brosnan) is selected to go to England and, from the components to be smuggled in to him, construct an atomic bomb. Meanwhile, in London, secret agent John Preston (Michael Caine) knows that something is afoot. Against a plot sometimes impenetrably complex, hunter and quarry move, Caine's Cockney common-sense saves the day and the film ends on a note of sentimentality and inconclusion as we learn the identity of the principal conspirator.
Sadly, I have never watched Remington Steele on television, so I do not know whether or not Pierce Brosnan has a scar beneath one eye. If he does not, director John Mackenzie surely chose to give him one here to lend character to his incredibly clean-cut, incredibly handsome, incredibly uninteresting features. Alternatively, if he is genuinely scarred, he would have been cast as Petrofsky because all Russians are scarred because all Russians are evil.
The Russian generals, Borisovs, Paflovs and Karpovs, machinate over vodka and call one another "comrade"; but they only ever speak in fluent English, presumably because the naive and undemanding audience doomed to queue to see The Fourth Protocol is too impatient and illiterate for subtitles. As a foil to Caine's Bermondsey earthiness and disingenuous charm, the controllers of M15 are all urbane, silver-haired patricians.
Films like this usually provide lucrative cameo roles for character actors worried about their tax bills: Anton Rogers, Michael Gough and the excellent Ian Richardson (his third espionage film after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Blunt) toot the money and should now run. It ends at Eton too: something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
And it will be noticed also that certain James Bond elements have been included, since they are mandatory in family thrillers. There is no escape from the car chase; and the bombassembly expert Moscow sends is not some ugly old major (complete with scarred cheek) but a sexy siren called Irina (skin undamaged). It comes as no surprise that between his helping her make the bomb and obeying orders and eliminating her, they make love. What, after all, could be more natural?
In other words Protocol panders shamelessly to its audience's sensationalistic cravings, appeals to expectations generated by the tabloids and wheels out for domestic and, more importantly American consumption, the familiar prototypes. It is all slick and entertaining enough as a study of betrayal, cynicism and the dispensability of underlings, but it is trash all the same, despite Forsyth's claims to integrity. If only he had said: I do so admire honesty, particularly in the very rich.