How accurate?


I watched BBC's Cambridge Spies which was brilliantly done, and so I was intrigued to know there was a movie about Guy Burgess after he defects to USSR. I don't know quite too much about Burgess, but I do know the basics. How accurate is this movie? Thx

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[deleted]

Coral Browne told the story to Alan Bennett when she met him after a performance of *The Old Country*, a play of his about an English Communist spy living in exile in the USSR. This was 1977. So she was remembering something that had happened 20-plus years earlier, and Bennett altered a few things.

The actor who played Hamlet in the touring production was Michael Redgrave. He's never named in the movie, possibly because Redgrave was still alive in 1983. He had known Burgess since the '30s when they were at college together and Redgrave was quite left-wing. Burgess went backstage after the show to visit him, and then threw up as he'd been drinking very heavily. Redgrave went next door to Browne's dressing room to ask if she could help clean Burgess up, although he didn't say who the guy was. In the movie Burgess rushes into Browne's dressing room with no introduction.

The rest of the stuff - Burgess contacting Browne to apologise, and asking her to visit his flat with a tape-measure - was all accurate, apparently. He sent her a cheque for six pounds when she was back home in the UK, to thank her for everything, saying why didn't she take a friend out to dinner with it. She never cashed it but kept it.

Later in 1983 Redgrave published his autobiography: he also went to Burgess' flat to visit him, and remembered it as being quite grand, whereas in the movie a lot is made of how shabby it is. The man's homesickness, capacity for shifting booze and occasional bouts of crying were as they are represented in the movie. The scene with Browne asking some officials at the Embassy for directions to Burgess' place, and being warned not to visit him, never happened. However, the whole cast were warned by the British ambassador in Moscow when they arrived not to have anything to do with Burgess, as he was always trying to get back home.

In the movie, after Browne has sent him his suit, Burgess contacts her to thank her, and ask her if she couldn't get him some British pyjamas. The firm that used to make Burgess' pyjamas refused to help her for ideological reasons, partly because they were Hungarian and this was after the Russian tanks had rolled into Budapest. John Schlesinger didn't like this and it got cut.

Bennett rewrote the movie as a stage play in 1988 (part of a double bill called 'Single Spies'), by which time Redgrave had died, and all the stuff about him was put back in.

You probably didn't want to know all that. Hope it was helpful anyway.

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[deleted]


Although this film was based on true incidents, I expect dramatic licence to take place in the adaptation.

Its that man again!!

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