Page Eight is a highly enjoyable top spy film shown on the BBC on Sunday August 28th having only been released in June and which will be shown in the United States later in the year.
It stars the brilliant Bill Nighy who never fails to please and whose film Glorious 39 was shown the previous Sunday and will be reviewed later. Both films are political fictions based on true events in the UK, Page Eight on Extraordinary Rendition Torture camps and 39 on the willingness of British top families and politicians to compromise with Hitler rather than face participation in another World War.
In Page Eight Bill plays a rounded Spook from the Oxbridge generation with his boss played my stalwart Michael Gambon and a Tony Blair type Prime Minister played by Ralph Fineness. When a say rounded I mean typical Oxbridge creative recruited when at University by his tutor and whose wife became the wife of the tutor because she was pregnant and Bill had already fallen in love with someone else. The daughter has become a recognised and commercially successful contemporary artist who in one moment of truth he tells her that her paintings are either fakes which he does not think or reveals an alarming sense of despair which fills him with horror and regret at his own failure as a father.
The sub plot red herring is when Bill is invited to help a young neighbour he had not met before who shares the same apartment block. She wants his visit to help her get out of a relationship with a young man he later learns she has slept with once. He also sees the same young man at the opening party of an exhibition of his daughter’s paintings. We the audience expect this to have significance although few if any will anticipate the actual connection.
The young woman does have an interest him in the need for help to secure the truth about the death of her brother, a believer in non violent action who she is convinced, as is her father, was executed by the Israeli’s when participating in a peace mission action. Bill uses an undercover operator working as a journalist to obtain a copy of the Israeli confidential file which confirms the murder of her brother.
The main issue is the presentation to Bill of a file which reveals on page eight that the Prime Minister must have known of the existence of the various bases throughout the world where the USA held Terrorist suspects, using torture to gain information. The subject is topical because of an ongoing court case in the USA, in the news today, in which an aircraft firm is suing for money it alleges is due from the USA government for arranging rendition flights. Extraordinary rendition is another name for kidnapping by a government without recourse to the usual rules and regulations.
The information has come from a secret informant known to his boss who then dies of a heart attack. There is nothing sinister in the death which the boss knew was coming but explains why he was insistent on Bill dealing with the information in the file. In addition to Bill and his boss someone in MI5 who appears to have an important role whose designation I missed and played Jill Tankard attends a meeting with the female Home Secretary who tells her but ask her not to do anything including not telling the Prime Minister. Tankard is hostile to Bill and to his boss and warns that his future in the service is in question.
What is revealed is that Tankard has operated a secret service within the secret service on behalf of the Prime Minister in association with the USA Homeland security run by the Republican President. It is a Democrat Senator who has flown to the UK to give the information to Gambon before his death. Tankard uses her son to run a top notch one man secret surveillance unit which again is highly topical as I have been reading the huge report by Liberty on the subject which was followed by a House of Commons select committee report and one by a committee of the House of Lords and which in turn followed the reports and warnings of the Information Commissioner.
Bill accepts the invitation from a third party to attend a college reunion dinner at which the Prime Minister is the Principal Guest. The Prime Minister keep Bill waiting until after midnight to have a private chat and attempt to bring him on side, offering to make him part of a new Homeland Security set up if he gives the only remaining copy of the file. That given to the Home Secretary has been yielded as she is made Deputy Prime Minister.
Bill also appears to do a deal on the basis that the Government admits the existence of the report on the death of his neighbour’s brother coupled with an admonition to the Israeli’s.
He makes peace with his daughter who he has learned is expecting a child which she proposes to bring up after a brief relationship with a concept artist. He sells one of his favourite paintings for cash from a art gallery owner former lover, (his flat is covered in paintings) and gives another to his now worshipping you have given be my life back young neighbour who offers to flee with him. He makes his departure/escape via a northern airport at the same time as the Funeral of his former boss and ex wife‘s husband. Wikipedia states that the scene where Bill gives the go ahead to the BBC to release information relates to the neighbour’s brother. I think not.
At the airport while Bill surveys the various flights to around the world and clutching the bag with the money he deposits the file in a bin. I think he has already passed a copy of the file to the BBC and authorised them to release the information bringing down the Prime Minister as his boss had wanted him to do. The parting scene with the neighbour also suggests that they had a future and perhaps she will join him when he is settled if he ever is. Meanwhile she has the paining on her wall and I wonder what arrangements he has made for the other paintings and his flat which are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to be converted into the cash he will need unless he plans to return after the dust has settled, perhaps in a sequel! It did not matter as I enjoyed the film from start to finish. The film boasts of asking 21st century about the role of governments in the technological era of international crime and international terrorism, and with a week to go before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
In Glorious 39 Bill plays the apparently loving adopting dad of Anne Keyes, a successful actress with natural siblings born after her adoption. The family live in a country house in Norfolk with a ruined monastery in the grounds which make a splendid play ground for a happy childhood with her brother and sister by adoption. Bill plays a Member of Parliament with close ties to the government which explains why he is storing confidential papers in a barn where the children now grown up children are not allowed to visit,
The summer has been hot and sunny for months on end, whereas this year the summer has been one of the coldest with an autumn to feel to the new month and children prepare to return to school.
The first action centres on the visit of a young boy to two men at their London home which appears locked into an era before World War Two, including radio sets from that period. They are played by Corin Redgrave and Christopher Lee. The boy wants to know what happened to a missing a relative, his great aunt, the adopted daughter of the Keyes’ family. The two men tell him the story which begins on the day Anne has arranged a birthday party for her father and whose mother who sits in the background tending the garden and is played by Jenny Agutter. Anne’s brother now works at the Foreign Office and he brings a friend (Balcome-Jeremy Northern) to the evening dinner of birthday of Bill where the family has earlier gathered for a party in the garden.
At the dinner party is a friend of Anne’s and her fiancée/lover who also works at the Foreign office and is also a Member of Parliament played by David Tennant(Dr Who) and who warns about the danger facing the country unwilling to understand the nature of the Nazi threat. He wants the country to have a new Prime Minister, a Churchill man.
The following day while searching for the missing family cat Anne enters the forbidden store where the car is found and she also finds a collection of gramophone records which takes a handful back only to find that they are recordings of people in conversations and not orchestral dances as per the labels.
The outspoken Member of Parliament is then found to have committed suicide and her fiancée goes off to investigate and support the parents who he knows. Anne tries to share concerns about the situation with her father who promises to listen to her but is busy with a recall of Parliament because of the international situation with Germany. Bill agrees to have the government archives removed and Balcome presses Anne from the return of the gramophone records which reinforces her suspicions about him. She keeps a couple of the records.
Her balance of mind is question after the child of her sister by adoption goes missing at a family picnic. She is concerned about the role of young boy relative who appears involved in the disappearance although the child is recovered unharmed. She goes to stay with an aunt played by Julie Christie when the family go off to London. In the absence of her boyfriend and not knowing who to trust she gives one of the records to her friend and fellow film actor played by Hugh Bonneville who was also a guest at the picnic. He is also found to have committed suicide although the gramophone record is retrieved. At one point while trying to leave for London is is apprehend by the military who say they now have unlimited powers because of the outbreak of war with Germany. She is released by the intervention of her family.
Another record is broken by a maid when she secretly listens at the family home in London following their return and this appears to reveal Hector expressing concern about the behaviour of Balcome towards him and his parents. At a Foreign Office party in London she attempts to tell her father about the concerns but he presses her to join her brother and sister who are holding a party for the children of Ambassadors. She is offered by her brother to find out the truth about her parents but she decides against. Her fiancé has also returned from a mission to Paris and she agrees to send him the remaining gramophone record after learning that he brother is involved in what has been going on an led to two deaths. He already knows and arranges to meet her vets where she agrees to take the family cat and that of her aunt to be killed as are many animals because of the deprivations expected because of the war, although he father and family are trying to do a secret deal.
At the vets Anne finds Lawrence’s body among the dead animals and she gives the record addressed to Winston Churchill to an evacuee girl to post. She is now in fear for life. She then discovers that her father, her brother and sister have been involved to keep Britain out of the War at all costs doing secret deals with Nazi Germany and Hitler. This includes the murders of her lover, the MP friend and the film actor. They family is at the centre of a conspiracy to take over the country if necessary.
Anne is kept prisoners and refuses to eat and drink from justified fear of being sedated. She is released from captivity by her mother by adoption and disappears. The plot is foiled and Churchill becomes Prime Minister.
The brothers finishing telling the story to boy explaining that the part they played had been required of them by the family. They say that Anne had died Canada some twenty years before. One admits that it was Balcome who had persuaded him to move the pushchair containing his younger brother away from Anne while when she went to sleep and had it down the lane where the child was found. The boy asks the brothers to meet his mother at a local square and when they go to meet the woman she is pushing an old woman in a chair and it is Anne, the boy’s grandmother who had known the truth but the family had wanted the brothers to admit the truth.
The film has nice rounded ending and good mixture of suspense although I was able to work out the father’s central role in the plot from his statements to Anne about the horror of the First World War In an interesting link to the Harry Lamb story her brother by adoption had insisted on giving her the information that her parents were travellers.
It stars the brilliant Bill Nighy who never fails to please and whose film Glorious 39 was shown the previous Sunday and will be reviewed later. Both films are political fictions based on true events in the UK, Page Eight on Extraordinary Rendition Torture camps and 39 on the willingness of British top families and politicians to compromise with Hitler rather than face participation in another World War.
In Page Eight Bill plays a rounded Spook from the Oxbridge generation with his boss played my stalwart Michael Gambon and a Tony Blair type Prime Minister played by Ralph Fineness. When a say rounded I mean typical Oxbridge creative recruited when at University by his tutor and whose wife became the wife of the tutor because she was pregnant and Bill had already fallen in love with someone else. The daughter has become a recognised and commercially successful contemporary artist who in one moment of truth he tells her that her paintings are either fakes which he does not think or reveals an alarming sense of despair which fills him with horror and regret at his own failure as a father.
The sub plot red herring is when Bill is invited to help a young neighbour he had not met before who shares the same apartment block. She wants his visit to help her get out of a relationship with a young man he later learns she has slept with once. He also sees the same young man at the opening party of an exhibition of his daughter’s paintings. We the audience expect this to have significance although few if any will anticipate the actual connection.
The young woman does have an interest him in the need for help to secure the truth about the death of her brother, a believer in non violent action who she is convinced, as is her father, was executed by the Israeli’s when participating in a peace mission action. Bill uses an undercover operator working as a journalist to obtain a copy of the Israeli confidential file which confirms the murder of her brother.
The main issue is the presentation to Bill of a file which reveals on page eight that the Prime Minister must have known of the existence of the various bases throughout the world where the USA held Terrorist suspects, using torture to gain information. The subject is topical because of an ongoing court case in the USA, in the news today, in which an aircraft firm is suing for money it alleges is due from the USA government for arranging rendition flights. Extraordinary rendition is another name for kidnapping by a government without recourse to the usual rules and regulations.
The information has come from a secret informant known to his boss who then dies of a heart attack. There is nothing sinister in the death which the boss knew was coming but explains why he was insistent on Bill dealing with the information in the file. In addition to Bill and his boss someone in MI5 who appears to have an important role whose designation I missed and played Jill Tankard attends a meeting with the female Home Secretary who tells her but ask her not to do anything including not telling the Prime Minister. Tankard is hostile to Bill and to his boss and warns that his future in the service is in question.
What is revealed is that Tankard has operated a secret service within the secret service on behalf of the Prime Minister in association with the USA Homeland security run by the Republican President. It is a Democrat Senator who has flown to the UK to give the information to Gambon before his death. Tankard uses her son to run a top notch one man secret surveillance unit which again is highly topical as I have been reading the huge report by Liberty on the subject which was followed by a House of Commons select committee report and one by a committee of the House of Lords and which in turn followed the reports and warnings of the Information Commissioner.
Bill accepts the invitation from a third party to attend a college reunion dinner at which the Prime Minister is the Principal Guest. The Prime Minister keep Bill waiting until after midnight to have a private chat and attempt to bring him on side, offering to make him part of a new Homeland Security set up if he gives the only remaining copy of the file. That given to the Home Secretary has been yielded as she is made Deputy Prime Minister.
Bill also appears to do a deal on the basis that the Government admits the existence of the report on the death of his neighbour’s brother coupled with an admonition to the Israeli’s.
He makes peace with his daughter who he has learned is expecting a child which she proposes to bring up after a brief relationship with a concept artist. He sells one of his favourite paintings for cash from a art gallery owner former lover, (his flat is covered in paintings) and gives another to his now worshipping you have given be my life back young neighbour who offers to flee with him. He makes his departure/escape via a northern airport at the same time as the Funeral of his former boss and ex wife‘s husband. Wikipedia states that the scene where Bill gives the go ahead to the BBC to release information relates to the neighbour’s brother. I think not.
At the airport while Bill surveys the various flights to around the world and clutching the bag with the money he deposits the file in a bin. I think he has already passed a copy of the file to the BBC and authorised them to release the information bringing down the Prime Minister as his boss had wanted him to do. The parting scene with the neighbour also suggests that they had a future and perhaps she will join him when he is settled if he ever is. Meanwhile she has the paining on her wall and I wonder what arrangements he has made for the other paintings and his flat which are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to be converted into the cash he will need unless he plans to return after the dust has settled, perhaps in a sequel! It did not matter as I enjoyed the film from start to finish. The film boasts of asking 21st century about the role of governments in the technological era of international crime and international terrorism, and with a week to go before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
In Glorious 39 Bill plays the apparently loving adopting dad of Anne Keyes, a successful actress with natural siblings born after her adoption. The family live in a country house in Norfolk with a ruined monastery in the grounds which make a splendid play ground for a happy childhood with her brother and sister by adoption. Bill plays a Member of Parliament with close ties to the government which explains why he is storing confidential papers in a barn where the children now grown up children are not allowed to visit,
The summer has been hot and sunny for months on end, whereas this year the summer has been one of the coldest with an autumn to feel to the new month and children prepare to return to school.
The first action centres on the visit of a young boy to two men at their London home which appears locked into an era before World War Two, including radio sets from that period. They are played by Corin Redgrave and Christopher Lee. The boy wants to know what happened to a missing a relative, his great aunt, the adopted daughter of the Keyes’ family. The two men tell him the story which begins on the day Anne has arranged a birthday party for her father and whose mother who sits in the background tending the garden and is played by Jenny Agutter. Anne’s brother now works at the Foreign Office and he brings a friend (Balcome-Jeremy Northern) to the evening dinner of birthday of Bill where the family has earlier gathered for a party in the garden.
At the dinner party is a friend of Anne’s and her fiancée/lover who also works at the Foreign office and is also a Member of Parliament played by David Tennant(Dr Who) and who warns about the danger facing the country unwilling to understand the nature of the Nazi threat. He wants the country to have a new Prime Minister, a Churchill man.
The following day while searching for the missing family cat Anne enters the forbidden store where the car is found and she also finds a collection of gramophone records which takes a handful back only to find that they are recordings of people in conversations and not orchestral dances as per the labels.
The outspoken Member of Parliament is then found to have committed suicide and her fiancée goes off to investigate and support the parents who he knows. Anne tries to share concerns about the situation with her father who promises to listen to her but is busy with a recall of Parliament because of the international situation with Germany. Bill agrees to have the government archives removed and Balcome presses Anne from the return of the gramophone records which reinforces her suspicions about him. She keeps a couple of the records.
Her balance of mind is question after the child of her sister by adoption goes missing at a family picnic. She is concerned about the role of young boy relative who appears involved in the disappearance although the child is recovered unharmed. She goes to stay with an aunt played by Julie Christie when the family go off to London. In the absence of her boyfriend and not knowing who to trust she gives one of the records to her friend and fellow film actor played by Hugh Bonneville who was also a guest at the picnic. He is also found to have committed suicide although the gramophone record is retrieved. At one point while trying to leave for London is is apprehend by the military who say they now have unlimited powers because of the outbreak of war with Germany. She is released by the intervention of her family.
Another record is broken by a maid when she secretly listens at the family home in London following their return and this appears to reveal Hector expressing concern about the behaviour of Balcome towards him and his parents. At a Foreign Office party in London she attempts to tell her father about the concerns but he presses her to join her brother and sister who are holding a party for the children of Ambassadors. She is offered by her brother to find out the truth about her parents but she decides against. Her fiancé has also returned from a mission to Paris and she agrees to send him the remaining gramophone record after learning that he brother is involved in what has been going on an led to two deaths. He already knows and arranges to meet her vets where she agrees to take the family cat and that of her aunt to be killed as are many animals because of the deprivations expected because of the war, although he father and family are trying to do a secret deal.
At the vets Anne finds Lawrence’s body among the dead animals and she gives the record addressed to Winston Churchill to an evacuee girl to post. She is now in fear for life. She then discovers that her father, her brother and sister have been involved to keep Britain out of the War at all costs doing secret deals with Nazi Germany and Hitler. This includes the murders of her lover, the MP friend and the film actor. They family is at the centre of a conspiracy to take over the country if necessary.
Anne is kept prisoners and refuses to eat and drink from justified fear of being sedated. She is released from captivity by her mother by adoption and disappears. The plot is foiled and Churchill becomes Prime Minister.
The brothers finishing telling the story to boy explaining that the part they played had been required of them by the family. They say that Anne had died Canada some twenty years before. One admits that it was Balcome who had persuaded him to move the pushchair containing his younger brother away from Anne while when she went to sleep and had it down the lane where the child was found. The boy asks the brothers to meet his mother at a local square and when they go to meet the woman she is pushing an old woman in a chair and it is Anne, the boy’s grandmother who had known the truth but the family had wanted the brothers to admit the truth.
The film has nice rounded ending and good mixture of suspense although I was able to work out the father’s central role in the plot from his statements to Anne about the horror of the First World War In an interesting link to the Harry Lamb story her brother by adoption had insisted on giving her the information that her parents were travellers.
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