The Hallucinogenic Hotel Room

One of the Facts of Cold War life is the repeated use, as spies, of American and Soviet civilians traveling or doing research in foreign countries. Often the spies are recruited by coercion--sometimes subtle, sometimes savage.

The Defector, an upcoming internationally flavored film starring the late Montgomery Clift, with Germany's Hardy Kruger and France's Macha Meril, presents the confrontation of two such reluctant Cold-Warriors. In the movie, an American physicist (Clift) is forced to be a courier in East Germany for the CIA and is caught by his east-European counterpart. In the end, the "secrets" they have risked their lives to steal or protect are handed across a conference table in Geneva, adding the ultimate absurd note to the Kafkaesque quality of this cloak-and-dagger film. The movie's dramatic appeal and the importance of its theme undoubtedly helped to lure Clift from a four-year self-imposed exile from the screen.

For all of Clift's critical and popular success (A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity, The Misfits, The Young Lions, Judgment at Nuremburg), his life was tragic. In 1956, on the way home from a party at his friend Elizabeth Taylor's, he was involved in a nearly fatal automobile accident. During the filming of Freud in 1962, he almost lost an eye. In July of this year he died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving behind The Defector as the final screen testimonial to his talents.

Clift, in constantly seeking roles in which he could explore the psyche of psychological misfits, produced a series of probing, sensitive portrayals. In The Defector, he again had such a role, especially in the nightmarish brainwashing sequences on these pages. The Defector is more Freudian than Freud, in which Monty played the father of psychiatry, and more sexually explicit than anything in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, wherein Clift psycho-analyzed Liz Taylor and discovered that she had been emotionally unstrung by witnessing her boyfriend being devoured alive by a wild band of beach boys. In The Defector, the eerie, emotion-shattering experience that Clift undergoes, though dreamlike, is actually being staged by the East Germans to bring on a mental break-down. But Clift, frightened and desperate, does not break: his ordeal strengthens him and he walks out shaken but sane.

As the American physicist, Bower, holidaying in West Germany, Clift is recruited by a CIA agent who threatens to cut off the flow of research money if Bower refuses to cooperate. In East Germany, Clift has his hotel room turned into a mental torture chamber after being closely questioned by one Heinzman (Kruger), an East German agent posing as the Leipzig public-relations officer. Heinzman--like Bower, a scientist working for his government under duress--is sympathetic, and his handling of Bower is less than thorough. Bower slips his grasp.

Bower's contact in East Germany, Dr. Saltzer, is killed by the Russian Secret Police, who recover the stolen secrets Bower seeks. Saltzer's assistant, Freida (Macha Meril), convinces Bower his only hope is in flight to the West. But as Bower and Freida make for the border, Heinzman is confronted by the chief of Russian Secret Police (David Opatoshu), who reveals that the "secrets" were offered as part of a scheme to trap Bower in the East and force him to defect. Heinzman is deliberately wounded by machine-gun bullets to effect a fake defection and allow him to spy on Bower in his U.S. laboratory.

Producer-director Raoul Levy has assembled a Babelesque cast and crew to turn out his epic. The filmscript was written by Levy, a Belgian, and an American, Robert Guenette, from a book on the real-life adventures of a British intelligence operative (The Spy, by Paul Thomas). In addition to America's Clift, Germany's Kruger and France's Meril, the cast includes London-born, Hollywood-bred Roddy McDowall, Christine Delaroche of France, Hannes Messemer of Germany, and famed French director Jean-Luc Godard in his first front-of-camera appearance. The technical crews were assembled from the best talent in France, Germany and the United States.

The action is set in East Germany's Leipzig and Dresden, and in order to re-create in prosperous Munich the stark atmosphere behind the Curtain, French art director Pierre Guffroy extensively studied material on East Germany gathered from 25.000-odd exiles who now live in Frankfurt, and was able to hire a photographer who spirited out detailed up-to-date pictures of East Germany.

The world of the international undercover agent is just as polyglot as Levy's hiring practices imply, and this very lack of a provincial outlook on the part of the moviemakers--unconcerned as they were with any particular nation's self-image--has amplified The Defector's sense of veracity. Clift and Kruger are every principled citizen forced--by circumstances, by loyalties, by fears--to commit an unprincipled act. And the utter irrelevance of their efforts is a damning and unsettling indictment of Cold War mendacity.