Brilliant and touching

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

*** This review may contain spoilers *** *Plot and ending analyzed*Defense of the Realm isn't too bad, I think it is an interesting film with a premise that is very obscure. If you can understand some of the low-audible dialogue and the heavy-handed British lingo, then it's a worthwhile film. Defense of the Realm has newspaper reporter Gabriel Byrne digging up muck in England, where a Member of Parliament gets thrashed and eventually dismissed for supposedly associating with a KGB agent. It's hard to follow at times and the ending is a big let-down because during the entirety of the film there was an enigmatic suspense that was really showing itself. Still, it does manage to bring enough closure to allow for the full critique of the American nuclear program abroad, which is staffed by lunatics. As a political thriller is should satisfy the basic audience.Also recommended: The Parallax View (1974) Three Days of the Condor (1975) The Conversation (1974) All the President's Men (1976) Telefon (1977)

***SPOILERS*** Hard to follow spy and cover-up movie about an incident at a US Air Force base in the English countryside that's loaded with nuclear missiles that the local population is totally unaware of. That's until a nuclear bomb laden US fighter plane almost crashed in trying to avoid a local runway from a juvenile detention center Steven Dyce, Steve Woodcock. Dyce was killed by th plane on the runway as he was trying to escape from the police with his friend Mickey Parker, Graham Fletcher Cook. That after the two tried to make their getaway in a stolen car.It's when member of Parliament, or MP for short, labor party bigwig Dennis Markham, Ian Bannen, started snooping around and trying to get to the bottom of what happened that he was exposed in not only cheating on his wife but having a tryst with a hooker named Marinda Court. It was Miss Court who was also involved with the East German military attaché in London Dietrich Kleist, Alexei Jawdokimov, who's also secretly working for the Soviet KGB! That has London tabloid reporter Nick Mullen, Gabriel Bryne, smell a big scoop and get on the story. It's Nick Mullen's friend at the tabloid Vernon Bayliss, Denholm Elliott, who smells a rat in this story and by getting in touch with Markham, who both were once members of the British Communist Party, who tells him that the entire story about his relationship with both Miss Court and Soviet Agent Klesit is pure BS or at least the Kleist part of it. Markham claims that it's really an attempt to cover up the Steven Dyce death and the circumstances surrounding it!It's after Vernon was mysteriously found dead from a heart attack in his London flat with it being ransacked that Mullen started to realize that the whole sex and spy thing about Markham was a red herring in order to keep the the real reason for trying to destroy Markhm's political career! It's really because of his investigation of the fatal accident that took young Steve Dyce's life! It's then that Mullen gets to work in uncovering what really happened to Dyce which leads to the highest members and most powerful of the British Government! Even higher then the Prime Minster at the time-in 1984-him or,in the person being Margaret Tatcher, herself! And at the same time puts Mullen as well as his partner in uncovering Dyce's death Markham's personal secretary Nina Beckman, Greta Scacchi, lives in serious jeopardy!Nothing really great here with the exception of the sexy Greta Scacchi getting a chance to show that she's as good an actress as a sex symbol. There's also actor Gabriel Brynes looking and acting like an Irish version of Al Pacino in the movie "Serpico" but in here playing an investigative reporter not an undercover New York plain clothes detective. P.S There's a photo in the movie that was faked up, by the members of the "Realm", to prove that Markham and Kleist actually knew each other in a photo shoot with Soviet Preimer Leonid Brezhnev taken in Prague in 1979. What we see is Markham and Kleist in the background looking like their good friends by them either winking or smirking at each other. What I noticed in the photo that was a lot more interesting and could have well proved the photo to be a fake is that in it was also the former Soviet Preimer Nikita Khrushchev! Khruschev was in fact dead, he died on Septemer 11, 1971, eight years before the photo was supposedly taken!

Gabriel Byrne stars in "Defence of the Realm," a 1985 film also starring Denholm Elliott, Greta Scacchi, Ian Bannen and Robbie Coltrane. Byrne plays Mullen, an aggressive newsman who is responsible for a story leading to the downfall of a Parliament member - he was seen leaving a madam's house, as was a KGB agent. However, he soon learns that there's much more to the story than that and that the man has been set up because he knew to much.This is a very good story with handsome Byrne heading up an excellent cast of foreign faces that will be very familiar to Americans. All of the acting is good, with a standout performance by Denholm Elliott. The beautiful Greta Scacchi, an asset to any production, is totally wasted here, however.What I liked best about this, and many other British films, is that you have to pay attention - first of all, so that your ears can adjust to the sound of not only the accents but also adjust to the way the British allow room tone to mix in with the dialogue, which we're not used to here. It gives the atmosphere a much more realistic flavor.Worth seeing.

This movie is a good example of the British film industry quietly making good movies that nobody saw. Brought out at the height of the cold war , as far as i know it was only ever seen on channel 4 (which kept the british film industry alive). The plot is hardly revolutionary. A journalist (a hard bitten Gabriel Byrne)stumbles upon a coverup by the british goverment, of a nuclear accident on an american airbase (which actually happened in the 1950s, but thats another story). Shades of disaster at silo seven, presidents men and forth protocol. But where this movie is different is the feeling that THEY are following you, helped by an understated yet eerie soundtrack. Byrne is followed by a car from the american airbase, it crowds him off the road and all of its windows are seen to be blacked out. He phones the American embassy and hears his phone being tapped.We dont even see the watchers untill the very end of the movie (which weakens it slightly) Even the Kangaroo court at the end of the movie is reminicnent of Franz Kafkas THE TRIAL. This is the X FILES without ufos, yet Byrne and scacchi are more that a little reminicent of mulder and scully (who also break the rule and dont fall in love on screen). Helped by fine performances from Denholm Elliot and Fulton Mackay(Robert Maxwell?), it evokes a patina of the hidden state only equilled in the uk by EDGE OF DARKNESS and Ken Loache`s HIDDEN AGENDA. its not the best thriller ever made in the UK, but it deserves a damn sight more attention than its received. See it , before THEY do.....