Educational Media Reviews Online

The Impossible Spy deserves a much better transfer to DVD than the one found on the Janson Media DVD I viewed. As I examined the disc, I was reminded of the bad old days of early DVD and digital media playback. It would appear that the compression on this transfer is such that the film is at times completely unwatchable, particularly when both the characters and the camera are moving independent of each other. Even so, during relatively still scenes it is still extremely frustrating to be constantly distracted by the jittery and pixilated movements of a hand moving slowly, particularly in the absorbing scenes between the two lead actors, Eli Wallach and John Shea. It is a welcome distraction, on the other hand, in the scenes including supporting actors whose acting caliber is inferior to the leads. I viewed this DVD copy on a high end installation which included and up-conversion DVD player. I also viewed it on a standard DVD payer hooked up to a television monitor and believe that the bad digital “look” was even more prominent on the standard set-up. Finally, I took this copy and viewed it on my computer with similar to slightly worse results.

Despite how bad my copy of the film looked the three times I watched it and the surprisingly poor acting on the part of all the female actors in this film, it still resonates as a well crafted narrative. John Shea’s performance as Elie Cohen is stellar and his ability to evince the correct accent needed for his spy persona is commendable. He moves from an Israeli accent to a nebulous Syrian one convincingly. The filmmakers admit during the opening credits that although the film is based on reality they had to invent information that did not appear in the press. The narrative is thus quite fictionalized and while these scenes show reverence for Elie Cohen, they portray him as human rather than superhuman. The real Elie Cohen, now an Israeli national hero, was recruited by the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, and assigned to infiltrate the Syrian military government. Unlike the liner notes that claim that he was actually nominated to be the Defense Minister of Syria, the film shows him being told after his capture that he was about to be nominated. In the end his information about artillery placement on the Golan Heights enabled the Israeli victory of the Six Day War in 1967. The DVD’s Special Features section provides a timeline of the Arab Israeli Conflict form the 1940s to the 1960s.

I simply cannot recommend The Impossible Spy because of the atrocious visual quality found on the DVD copy I reviewed. This is unfortunate because otherwise I would have been inclined to recommend the film.