Trinity College, Cambridge, 1934.  Where the cream of the British gentry send their sons to get an education and prepare them for a life as a gentleman.  But the world was changing.  After the slaughter of WW I, many people no longer felt that the royal families of Europe were competent to lead their people.  The world was in the grip of the great depression.  Russia had overthrown the Tsar several years earlier and was trying out a new form of government, communism.  Hitler had risen to power in Germany, and none of the European contries, or anyone else in the world, were doing anything to stop him.  In England there were people who had no food to eat, and others who had more than they could want.  It was in this atmosphere that four rich, idealistic youths decided that communism was the best political system for solving the world's problems.  After contact was made with a Russian agent, these four became traitors and spies.  These privileged youths would rise to the highest echelons of power in the British secret service and feed information to their Russian allies for twenty years.

Cambridge Spies is a four part miniseries that aired this year in the UK.  Based on the true story of the most notorious spies in the world, this is not a documentary.  It is a drama, and liberties are taken with the facts, but it is what happened in essence.

The series starts off with Kim Philby (Toby Stephens), Guy Burgess (Tom Hollander), Anthony Blunt (Samuel West), and Donald Maclean (Rupert Penry-Jones) at school at Cambridge in 1934.  It covers their initial meeting, friendship, and mutual admiration for communism.  They get in contact with a Russian agent, (the details of this are glossed over) and are given their first small assignments.  They graduate and set off into the world, still loudly procommunist.

Since they come from well to do families, Moscow tells the group to appear to be fascists (the enemy of communism at the time) so that they can get jobs in the government without anyone suspecting where their real loyalties lie.  They do this for a time.  Kim Philby becomes a reporter and is sent to Spain to cover the civil war there between fascists (backed by Hitler) and communists (backed by Russia.)  He sends back stories that are very favorable to the fascists and gains their trust.  Maclean goes into the diplomatic corps, and the rest get government jobs.  Eventually, they all end up in the foreign office or state department where they have access to highly classified documents that are passed on to the Soviets.

This series traces their lives.  Their loves and losses, their rise in the ranks, and the fact that they are never suspected because of who they are.  Upper-class British gentlemen are just not spies.

With four hours to use, many aspects of these complex characters are shown.  Each person's individuality comes through, and that helps in understanding their treasonous acts.  At the begining, the series does an excellent job of showing why these respectable youths would admire communism.  It illustrates the defects in British society and how communism would remedy them.   It shows the world as it was at that time, with most of the world's countries so scared of war that they allow a monster like Hitler free reign until it's too late.  The only country that would stand up to Hitler in Spain was Russia.

Of course, the real life of spies is not very glamorous.  There are no car chases or fights on the top of train cars.  Most of it is passing documents along to a contact.  Even without the glamour of James Bond, the script manages to keep your interest and avoids getting bogged down in routine.  Even knowing how it all turns out, I was very wrapped up in the show and was eager to finish the whole series.  It is educational (to an extent) while being entertianing to watch.

That is not to say the script is perfect, it does have it's flaws.  At the beginning, it was hard to understand the relationship between certain characters and what their motivation for some actions were.  As the story progressed, and the characters became more familiar, their actions made more sense.

Though an admirable job is done explaining why these four chose to betray their country in the first place, I never got a feeling for why they continued after WWII.  Certainly these people working in intelligence would know better than anyone the horrors perpetrated in Russia by Stalin.  Yet they still feed them information.  Maybe they were afraid to stop, or maybe they still held on to their convictions.  The show doesn't address the issue.

Cambridge Spies has a lot going for it.  Much of the camera work is admirable.  The scenes are impeccably framed, making many shots look like they could be still photographs.  The gardens of Windsor castle and the streets of Paris just before the Nazis march in are treated with the same care and attention to detail.  There is effective use of jump cuts, sparingly used, to show the passage of time quickly.  Lenses with large fields of depth are used to keep two people in focus who are not in the same plane.  For a made for television miniseries, it was of a higher quality than I was expecting.

The acting, as with many British dramas, is top notch.  All four of the main actors play their parts very convincingly.  They give their characters depth.  Samuel West gave Blunt (who was related to the Queen) that famous British reserve, but allowed cracks of emotion to show through at rare times.  Tom Hollander's Guy Burgess is witty and charming.  He's also a drunk and an oaf who enjoys picking up men in bathrooms.  Rupert Penry-Jones portrays Don Maclean as the not too bright gentleman of privileged who feels guilty for what he has, yet aware of his limitations.  And Toby Stephens does a fantastic job as Kim Philby, the most enigmatic of the group.  Fiercely intelligent, loyal, and devious, yet filled with angst.  These characters all went through similar changes during the course of the film.  They start out eager and idealistic but eventually the strain of their life style starts eating at them.  Even without a lot of dialog,  the toll this strain is taking on them is made apparent.  All these actors were able to bring life to these complex and contradictory people, and play them convincingly over a twenty year time span.

The one aspect that amazed me most about this program was the make-up.  It was impeccable.  Taking place over the span of almost 20 years, the characters aged slowly and naturally.  They never looked like young actors made up to look old or vice versa.  There was never a jarring difference in ages between one scene and the next.  The make-up was invisible, like it should be.

Audio:

This DVD has a digital stereo sound track with English subtitles.  Most of this movie is people talking to one another, there are not a lot of loud scenes.  The few that there are, most notably a German aerial attack on a village during the Spanish civil war, were not very dynamic.  The explosions sounded a little dull.  But that is a very small portion of this series.  The dialog was clear and easy to understand even when people were whispering.  Given that this was only a two channel presentation, the rain (this does take place in England after all, there's lots of rain) sounded full and natural.  There are no pops or cracks, and hiss is not evident at normal volumes.  A solid production that would not have greatly benefited from a 5.1 mix.

Video:

The widescreen anamorphic presentation of this show is very good.  Castles and large manor houses fill the screen from side to side and  are wonderful to look at.  The lines are crisp and clean, without the fuzzy look a lot of British shows end up having when released as region one DVDs.  There is a fair amount of edge enhancement throughout the show.  At some points it is not noticeable, but gets rather heavy handed at other times.  This shouldn't be distracting on the largest direct view televisions.  Some details were lost in the dark areas and shadows, but only the most minor ones.  The colors are very lush and accurate.  It is a wonderfully filmed show and even with the edge enhancement it makes a very nice looking disc.

The Extras:

These DVDs have a nice set of extras included on the second disc (with the exception of the commentary to episode one that appears on the first disc.)

Commentaries:  There are commentaries on episodes one and four with director Tim Fywell, producer Mark Shivas, and writer Peter Moffat.  I rate these as slightly less than average commentaries.  They often discuss where scenes were shot, and who would and wouldn't let them use locations for the production.  I was hoping for more of the history behind the story.  The writer admits that he spent four years researching and writing the script, but he doesn't discuss the differences between reality and the film version at length.  He does relate some anecdotes that did not make it into the film, and fleshes out the background to a couple of scenes, but I was hoping for more.  Another problem I had with the commentaries is that there are long gaps where nothing is said.  With three people talking about the series, I was expecting more chatter.

Photo Gallery:  A generic set of shots taken from the movie, and publicity photos.  These galleries rarely excite me, and this one didn't either. It would have been nice if they had included some vintage photos of the real spies, but they didn't.

Spy Web – The Cambridge Spies:  A 45 minute television show that gives an accurate look at the Cambridge spies.  Their history is told through interviews with their friends and colleges, pictures and film clips.  Very informative and interesting show.

Historical Scrapbook:  A series of video clips from BBC news shows concerning the spies.  All of these are interesting to watch and I'm very pleased that the went to the trouble to track this material down.  The scrapbook consists of:

    Queen's Gallery:  From 1965, a five minute tour of Queen Elizabeth's art collection with Anthony Blunt as the guide.  A historically interesting piece.

    Anthony Blunt – A Spy Case Package:  A nine minute portion of an interview with Anthony Blunt from 1979.  Blunt reads a prepared statement and answers a few questions that are put to him about his time as a spy.

    Donald MacLean's Obituary:  A 3 ½ minute obit that was shown on the BBC.

    Philby Appears on Soviet TV:  3 minute news story concerning the fact that Kim Philby had given a short interview that was shown in the USSR.  This was the first public interview he had given since defecting.  Unfortunately, this is not the interview itself, just the BBC's reporting of the incident.

    Newsnight:  Kim Philby's Death:  a nine minute story and interview with a Philby biographer on the famous spy's life soon after he died.

Trailers:  There trailers for Coupling, The Office, Father Ted, and BBC America.

These extras add a lot to the whole package.  After watching the four hour series, my interest in the real people was piqued.  Seeing contemporary news stories concerning them was very interesting.

Final Thoughts:

If you are coming to this show hoping for a historically accurate examination of the Cambridge Spies, this is not the show for you.  Some things have been rearranged and altered to make the story flow better.  Don't let that deter you from checking this series out.  It is a fine drama that does encapsulate who these men were, and why they took the path they chose.  The story is interesting, and the acting top notch.  The camera work is much better than one would expect for a TV mini series.  Fans of British drama should definite make a point of checking this out.   Recommended.