Enigma

(UK - France)

Archerwest/SFPC. Director Jeannot Szwarc; Producer Peter Shaw; Screenplay John Briley; Camera Jean-Louis Picavet; Editor Peter Weatherley; Music Marc Wilkinson, Douglas Gamley; Art Director Francois Comtat

Martin Sheen
Brigitte Fossey
Sam Neill
Derek Jacobi
Michael Lonsdale
Frank Finlay

Enigma is a well-made but insufficiently exciting spy thriller which rather pleasingly emphasizes the emotional vulnerabilities of the pawns caught up in East-West intrigue.

Martin Sheen ably portrays an East German refugee who, after working as a Radio Free Europe-type broadcaster out of Paris, is recruited by the CIA to return to East Berlin. Assignment: steal a coded micro-processor, or scrambler, from the Russians before the KGB proceeds with the assassination of five Soviet dissidents in the West.

After neatly making his way to his destination. Sheen locates old flame Brigitte Fossey who, while resisting the idea of resuming their romance, sympathizes with his unexplained cause.

John Briley's screenplay [from the novel Enigma Sacrifice by Michael Barak] keeps everything coherent, not always easy with this sort of fare, and Jeannot Szwarc's direction is very handsome indeed.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1983. Running time: 101 MIN.

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