The Courier
Short description
The Courier is a Cold War drama about Greville Wynne, an ordinary British businessman who is recruited by British and American intelligence to make contact with Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet military officer who has been supplying secrets to the West. Posing as a travelling salesman, Wynne becomes the link between Penkovsky and Western agencies, carrying information out of Moscow as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates. Their arrangement grows into a friendship, and both men take on increasing danger as the intelligence they pass is used to help defuse the standoff over Soviet missiles in Cuba.
The film was directed by Dominic Cooke, following his 2018 debut On Chesil Beach. Tom O'Connor wrote the screenplay, and Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wynne opposite Merab Ninidze as Penkovsky, with Rachel Brosnahan as CIA officer Emily Donovan, Jessie Buckley as Wynne's wife Sheila and Angus Wright as Dickie Franks. It is a British-American production with a credited cast of 34 and crew of 43.
Released in January 2020, the film took about 26 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.2 out of 10 from around 81,000 votes, and on TMDB 7 out of 10 from roughly 1,400 votes. A critics' rating of 6.8 out of 10 from 215 reviews places it close to the audience scores, suggesting a reasonably well-received but not widely celebrated historical thriller.
What's left behind the scenes
- In reality, Vinna was detained in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, shortly before the opening of a trade fair that he himself had organized. He was almost immediately extradited to the USSR.
- Benedict Cumberbatch lost almost 10 kilograms for filming the scenes of Greville Wynne's time in a Soviet prison.
- The original title of the film translates to 'Courier'.
- At the beginning of the film, there is a mention of the CIA's failure with a certain Popov. This refers to Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a GRU officer who collaborated with the CIA during World War II and then became a double agent in Vienna. Popov transmitted valuable intelligence information to the West, in particular, he warned the CIA about the USSR's successes in gathering information about the U-2 aircraft. Over time, Popov began to be suspected, and in 1958 he was dismissed from the GRU, and a year later he was arrested. The film begins in August 1960, but Popov was already executed in January 1960.
- Vinna was exchanged for a Soviet intelligence officer named Konon Molodyy (1922-1970), who was an illegal operative working in London under the name Gordon Lonsdale, as depicted in Robert Tronson's (1924-2008) film “Ring of Spies” (1964). Molodyy once worked in the US under the direction of Rudolf Abel (1903-1971), about whom Steven Spielberg made the dramatic thriller “Bridge of Spies” (2015).
- The screenwriter, Tom O’Connor, became interested in the history of Soviet-American spy games during the 2016 US presidential election. In particular, he was attracted to Oleg Penkovsky (1919-1963), who is played by Merab Ninidze in this film, and with whom Greville Maynard Wynne (1919-1990), a British businessman recruited by "MI-6", collaborated.
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