Storyville: The Spy Who Went Into the Cold – Kim Philby

Kim Philby was an archetypal English gentleman. ‘If he could be a spy,’ reckons Patrick Seale, who wrote a book about him, ‘anyone could’. This fascinating film portrays Philby as a man apart, but also as far from untypical of the bizarre world he inhabited.

Philby was an inveterate boozer, had an eye for the ladies, was notoriously unpredictable and, as events would prove, was entirely at ease with the double-cross. But on the strength of this murky delve into the world of cold war espionage, that simply made him one of the gang. Philby, of course, was working for the Russians all along. But the circumstances surrounding even this simple fact are thrown into doubt here. Why was he allowed to get away with it for so long? Was he induced to defect by MI6 in 1963 to avoid an embarrassing trial? Was he even trusted in Russia?

Director George Carey does a good job of marshalling the often bewildering sprawl of facts, fictions and half-truths and the result is a film that works as both an insight into an extremely odd man and a shapshot of an era.