Cold War Berlin returns in ‘Spy City’
Cities have personalities that lend themselves to typecasting. New York suggests ambitious people too busy to pretend to be polite. New Orleans is often “cast” as a place where the dead and the living intermingle. Miami presents a hot and sexy backdrop, ripeness on the verge of rot and the perfect setting for cocaine heist movies. Romans know how to live, and if you can’t fall in love in Paris, you’re destined to be single.
Given its history as an enemy capital and a divided Cold War city, Berlin remains a place for intrigue, mixed allegiances and betrayal. Now streaming on AMC+, the six-part drama series “Spy City” takes place in 1961, when the Cold War nearly turned hot over the Soviets’ decision to physically divide the city with concrete and barbed wire.
In this fictional tale, British agent Fielding Scott (Dominic Cooper) has been sent to Berlin to find the source of a mole in his organization’s ranks, a spy so well-infiltrated that he (or she) has turned American, British and French espionage efforts into an open book.
Scott’s assignment is complicated by the fact that he’s loathed by his fellow British agents. He shot and killed one of their colleagues in an undercover operation gone very wrong. Scott doesn’t believe his victim was entirely innocent. But nobody else seems to agree. Or admit that they do.
“Spy City” is well shot and acted, and it does a credible job of re-creating a world (and fashions) some 60 years gone. Cooper, best known from “Preacher” and “Captain America: The First Avenger,” looks good as the buttoned-down agent with a JFK haircut, even if he can seem a little too pretty to carry a license to kill. At times he resembles a young and unwrinkled Dirk Bogarde (“The Servant”), a British star working in the era “Spy City” evokes.
The tone is more le Carre than James Bond, thanks to a script by William Boyd, author of many acclaimed novels, including “Brazzaville Beach.” He’s also the author of “Restless,” adapted in 2012 as a compelling TV film about a young woman (Michelle Dockery) who discovers that her aged mother was actually a long-serving Soviet sleeper agent recruited during World War II.
The Cold War remains a fertile ground for spy fiction because the lines seemed so clearly demarcated. But as we learn in le Carre novels and in “Spy City,” your most mortal foes might actually be on your own team.
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