Red Joan [DVD] [2019]

An interesting film and a tragic reminder of the effects of war and atomic weapons.

Espionage in the time of war..making choices dictated by your conscience

There are some very good aspects to this film but, for us, it had a bit too much of a BBC Sunday night drama. That's probably deliberate and, of course, okay for many. But, and despite the once again excellent acting of Judi Dench (and Sophie Cookson), we felt it could have contained more threat - to Joan, not the nation - and been darker too.It might be thought easy that Judi Dench could carry off the role of an elderly, intelligent woman but she acts the shock and stupor of the accused soviet spy tremendously well (conveying the role of well meaning but naïve scientist/academic of the times).Sophie Cookson was a tour de force (as she was in the BBC role recently as Christine Keeler). Ben Miles, in the role of Joan's son, was also, once again, first-rate. But why did soviet spy Sonya have to be depicted as a vamp - surely a cliché. Sadly too, we didn’t find Tom Hughes very convincing as a German / Russian Jewish émigré.But, overall, it’s a good drama - though it could have been excellent.PS It's an old gripe of mine that all the clothing in period dramas always looks brand new and well cleaned - even the extras waving placards and heckling in the streets. Similarly, the cars always looked washed and in excellent condition. Did everybody have time, post war, to wash their cars, and enough money always to afford new clothes?

The film loosely based on the true Melita Norwood story...After being widowed for several years Joan (Judi Dench) who these days lovingly tendsher garden suddenly finds herself linked with what is seen as treason.Arrested some 50 years after the events, she, when questioned, reflects on those longlost days when as a promising physics student at Cambridge in 1938 she becomesromantically involved with a fellow student, a communist sympathiser.After her graduation, Joan (young-Joan Sophie Cookson) secures a position as an assistantin a weapons research facility where she becomes intricately in the development of anuclear weapon.When now developed the bomb is used by the Americans to end the war in Japan Joanbecomes troubled by the vast destruction and loss of life caused by the device.She is approached by her once romantic link to share the secrets of the weapon so Russiacould be equal to the west.Joan at first rejects the request, after all, she'd signed the official secrets act, and couldn'tbetray the trust placed in her.However, eventually, she does pass on imperative information enabling communist Russiato develop the weapon.Joan saw it, not as betrayal, but, by evening things up, preventing further use of the deadlyweaponry.....how could one make a judgement?As always, perhaps one of the best actresses that ever graced the screen, Judi Dench as theelderly Joan is superb.

Red Joan purports to be based on the story of Melita Norwood, the female Soviet agent who worked lifelong in the British Ministry of Defence whilst regularly giving critical intelligence to the Russians, for purely ideological reasons, who was only unmasked as a very old lady and who showed zero remorse. That is not this film. This film is about a charming young woman (played engagingly by Sophie Cookson, a young actress of real ability) who is naively duped by scheming young Marxists at Cambridge (and one rather good looking, but manipulative male one in particular, plus a glamorous and somewhat implausible female operative) into supporting the Russian line during the worst years of Stalinist show trials and the like. At one point she rather bravely challenges them in a meeting and is condemned, but she continues to loosely align herself, despite being an engineering student - usually a hot bed of right wingery - with the Marxists and the Soviet-admiring CPGB (never named, but it's them), which was the preserve of unreconstructed Stalinists in the UK. She later joins the nuclear-bomb making hothouse, but not the Manhatten Project - instead, she is working with the secretive British continuation of solo efforts to make a British Bomb, later delivered. A nice little cameo in the film is Clement Atlee dropping by to urge them on - a reminder that it was Labour, not the Tories, who brought the Bomb to Britain.So far, so believable. Things start to drift though. She comes across the suicide of her male Marxist 'lover' and is devastated, despite already knowing full well that he used her for political reasons. The same strangely contradictory scenario is played out when she continues to pass the UK's nuclear secrets to the Soviets, purely (we are told) because she believes that balance is needed to prevent the evil Americans from global domination - a decision she takes when she hears about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (No mention here of the millions of allied lives saved by not having to fight Japan - perhaps, despite being a clever, experienced young woman at the heart of the nuclear program, she was unaware of that.) This really stretches credulity and we start to wonder what is going on.Meanwhile, time-flipped into the now, Judy Dench is (with her typical expertise and aplomb) playing the elderly version of our slightly confused, but honorable spy. The older lady, pressured by determined questions from Special Branch, eventually succumbs and after repeated obfuscation, admits the truth, unimpressively. The final scene is supposedly emotionally redemptive, but I found it annoying and I shared the feelings of the angry, jostling journalists peppering her with insulting questions.This is supposed to work as a feminist story of an innocent young woman exploited and misused by the cynical politics of her day, but it doesn't come out like that. It is merely dubious and unsatisfactory.A movie about the real Melita Norwood, a middle class English woman who repeatedly betrayed her country to a bunch of evil and corrupt despots, without apparently giving a fig for her own people, would probably have been harder to do, but more interesting. There are few figures as daft and at the same time malign as those Brits who continued to support Stalinism long after everyone else had realised the truth about him. That's the real area to explore. This film is weak and unsustainable, despite being very well acted and (in places) very affecting.