Heroes of the KGB: The Communist Bloc's Spy Films

“We’re used to spy films in which the communists are the bad guys – but the eastern bloc had its own secret agent screen heroes, too…. A secret agent is attending a party in an elegant apartment. Beautiful young people wear the latest fashions, sip martinis and canoodle in corners. The spy slips into a back room and starts breaking into a safe. It looks like a scene from a James Bond movie – except this is communist Hungary, and the heroes are what western policy makers in the cold war would have called “them”, rather than “us”. The film is Fotó Háber, an ultra-stylish spy drama made in Budapest in 1963, and, like many of the films emerging from behind what was the iron curtain, it blows apart the glum, grey image of the eastern bloc from the inside.”

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