Reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Many viewers are ... going to feel cheated by the realist style, the bright colour and the naturalistic sound. At every point where a conventional sequence development seems about to be realised it is abruptly arrested, most obviously in the use of the traditional 'flight into Scotland' trope (cf. The Thirty-Nine Steps ) which is abandoned as inexplicably as it begins. Spy Story is, in fact, is the supreme anti-Hitchcock, naturalising the Master's most celebrated and most familiar formal devices so that they are neutralised and exist as figures in a pattern from which emotion, and above all suspense, has been eliminated." [3]
David McGillivray wrote in Screen International : "One way to boost the business of Spy Story would be to offer prizes to those who could prove they understood it. It is, to my mind, incomprehensible from beginning to end. ... This would be unimportant, of course, had the plot been a hook on which to hang the sex and violence usually associated with espionage thilers. But there is none. Author Len Deighton's intention (to which Lindsay Shonteff has adhered slavishly) was to point up the childishness and futility of Secret Services by detailing page upon page of exchanged pleasantries and political shop talk. Much of this is well observed (apparently there is no screenplay credit because Shanteff got his secretary to copy the dialogue direct from the novel), and much is well played, particularly by Don Fellows and the late Michael Gwynn. But unfortunately does not mak for very compulsive viewing." [4]
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