MovieChat Forums > The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) Discussion > absolutely loved it, but was fiedler's p...

absolutely loved it, but was fiedler's prosecution case over, really?


I'm just thinking Fiedler would've been smart enough to construct an airtight prosecution along these lines: Either Mundt is a traitor, or he's so incompetent that he was working for years with a British agent.

See what I'm saying? Tribunal, listen to him. His defense to the charge of being a willful traitor is that he was woefully incompetent and certainly gave away tons of critical information, with more or less the same effect as if he'd been a traitor. So which is it?

And even if Fiedler didn't think of it, why would the tribunal not cop on? At most, Fiedler had been duped by the British for a few weeks. Mundt had been duped for years. Why would the wrath of the tribunal (imprisonment and almost certain execution) be directed at Fiedler, then?

A somewhat minor carp in a brilliant film with brilliant writing. But still.

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Thought it odd that he was never allowed to bring up his evidence regarding the financial transactions.

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Fiedler was already on Death's door because he was Jewish, living in a system where anti-semitism thrives, now that the Nazis have been beaten. In the end, if it came to that, Fiedler was always going to be the one liquidated because he was Jewish and Mundt wasn't. If you look at the whole story, you can see that Fiedler and Leamas were both necessary sacrifices made to protect Control's REAL asset- the double agent Mundt.

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