Reilly, Ace of Spies is widely considered to be one of the great British television mini-series ever made. I can't agree with that but it has many excellence aspects that make it worth viewing, once or twice, but I can't imagine wanting to view it more than that simply because it is often tedious and slow-moving.
The first problem is with Sam Neill's two-dimensional Sidney Reilly. This character never comes alive for me. I think this production got hung up on his being the prototype for Ian Fleming's James Bond, who is a much more fleshed-out and interesting character than Neill's take on the real master spy who flourished, if you can call it that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Reilly was in all the hot spots, Port Arthur, Moscow, St Petersburg, just when the muck was hitting the fan. So the potential for a rattling good tale is there in the original material but it doesn't have much dramatic impact here. The script is good, within the limitations of the vision of the production team. The studio-bound sets and London-bound locations, with a few shots of Malta thrown in to represent Manchuria, are well handled but as the series progresses the same buildings keep reappearing with the same boarded up windows, this after some number of years have passed in the action. Continuity and editing are not two of the strong points of this show.
The first episodes are the most successful, though even then the action moves along very slowly and becomes tedious and sigh-making. Too much of the script is spent on reading letters out loud as they are being typed, and long soulful looks from distressed women who Reilly treats like throw away dolls. He jumps in and out of beds a great deal, which is always boring. When will film makers figure that out?
Reilly's behavior confirms my suspicion that most gigolos who enjoy great sexual conquests are really the most misogynistic of men. Sam Neill captures that reptilian side of Reilly's nature but displays absolutely not a shred of a sense of humor or irony. His facial expressions barely cover the gamut from A to B and all the many blank moments of supposed meaningly looks are simply vacuums of time, as if he's trying to remember his lines without appearing to be thinking about it.
The cast is chock-a-block with famous faces but none of them really shines very brightly. The most successful is the less well-known Norman Rodway as Commander Cummings, head of the British secret service. He is the only member of the cast, that I can think of off hand, who displays any grit and passion about his character.
Kenneth Cranham is unrecognizable as Lenin, with his head shaved. His portrayal is oddly muted, as is that of David Burke's Stalin, in a ridiculous wig that looks like it's about to fall off the top of his head. It is refreshing to have these two tyrants portrayed in something other than the usual ranting maniacs, but they are simply too passive here. Stalin made Hitler look like Pollyanna when it came to genocide but in this series one doesn't really get the sense that THIS Stalin was all that blood-thirsty.
The music by Harry Rabinowitz isn't very good either. It is insipid and gutless and extremely repetitive. On top of which it is recorded in a giant bathroom acoustic rather like those technicolor extravaganzas, like Nicholas and Alexandra, of the 1960s and 1970s. The score reflects the over-all flaccidity of this series.
I'm sure the story of Sidney Reilly could be told in a much more exciting and forward moving way. Reilly, Ace of Spies seems to be one of those po-faced 'teaching' mini-series that fall fatally between the two stools of fiction and non-fiction.
If you are interested in this period of European history I recommend acquiring Fall of Eagles. It's less cinematic, which is good I think, and more along the lines of The Pallisers in style. Not the pot-boiler melodrama we have with Reilly, Ace of Spies.
