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The titular building evokes Foreign Correspondent, but it's The Man Who Knew Too Much at the center of Don Siegel's refined Hitchcockisms. The innocence of youth doesn't last long in barbed-wire terrain, two schoolboys stumble across a gang of arms smugglers while sneaking into a disused military base, one of them is the son of the Secret Intelligence Service agent (Michael Caine). A fortune in diamonds is demanded as ransom, the operative remains "remarkably composed" between kidnappers and bureaucrats. "I married a soldier, I ended up with a spy," cries the wife (Janet Suzman), his dispassionate mien comes in handy as he goes rogue with exploding attaché case in hand. English dryness through the prism of American acerbity, a fine-grained meditation regularly mistaken for a low-wattage thriller. (Caine's Harry Palmer iconography is inescable, though the tone is far closer to the Chabrol of This Man Must Die and Le Boucher.) John Vernon is the ruthless abductor, Donald Pleasence a sniffy fusspot of a department director, "if he hasn't solved the Times puzzle by 10 in the morning, he has to go to his doctor for a check-up." A chase through the London Tube is a crisp montage to be contrasted with the single-take setup of the gang fabricating evidence, the moll (Delphine Seyrig) disrobes for an incriminating snapshot and then tenderly smooths out the creases on the bed she's just sprawled on. Drowned in hemorrhaging wine, resurrected in bullet-splintered wood, the Siegel hero on the run from underworld and institution alike. "You're the kind of machine who should be working for us." Telefon is the allusive companion piece. With Joseph O'Connor, Clive Revill, Joss Ackland, Catherine Schell, Denis Quilley, Derek Newark, Edward Hardwicke, and Hermione Baddeley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |