Hallelujah: our first screening of a much-requested spy thriller, one of the most intelligent and entertaining of its genre, as witty and cynical as they come, and considered by some Mason’s best Hollywood film. Nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards®, 5 Fingers tells the gripping true story of an ambitious valet, working for the British ambassador in neutral Turkey during WWII, who schemes to make himself a gentleman of leisure by selling top secret documents to the Nazis in Ankara. The coolly determined servant involves a destitute ex-countess, played by the ravishing Danielle Darrieux; the scene in which the lady and the valet attempt to discover each other’s weaknesses is a marvel of verbal parry and evasion. With crackling dialogue from the screenwriter of The Bridge on the River Kwai, a tense-making score by Bernard Herrmann, exotic Turkish locales, and the magnificently poised team of Mason and Darrieux—he at his most seductive and deceitful—5 Fingers makes for one heady entertainment. “As dandy an espionage thriller as ever went through the polished hands of a Grahame Greene or an Alfred Hitchcock” (The New York Times).
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