'High Treason' was the second of an unofficial trio of cold war dramas directed by Roy Boulting, beginning with 'Seven Days to Noon' in 1950 and ending with 'Suspect' in 1960. For the few people that have ever heard of it, 'High Treason' comes as an embarrassment undoing all the good that Roy and his brother John had done the year before with the Oscar-winning 'Seven Days to Noon' which stands up impeccably to modern political sensibilities after nearly seventy years; while 'High Treason' seems to belong more with Hollywood exercises in Red-baiting paranoia like 'The Iron Curtain' and 'I Was a Communist for the FBI'.
As filmmaking, however, it's well up to the standards of the Boultings' other films of the period, immaculately shot on location by Gilbert Taylor (and giving pride of place in a slam-bang climax to my favourite London landmark, Battersea power station), wittily scripted and flavourfully acted by an enormous cast of familiar British faces (including Andre Morell returning as Supt. Folland from 'Seven Days to Noon').
Just as ten years earlier wartime British films had exaggerated the extent of activity by wartime British fifth columnists, so the organised sabotage depicted here is rather fanciful. But the Portland spy case ten years later proved 'High Treason's depiction of spies in suburbia was spot on, while the defection of Burgess & Maclean the very year the film was released would eventually blow the lid off just how high within the British establishment the Kremlin's influence had reached - as this film insinuates in the unctuous form of the urbanely treacherous Grant Mansfield. (At that very moment a joint British & American operation to incite a popular revolt against the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania was meeting with failure after catastrophic failure costing the lives of over 300 agents because operational matters had been placed in the dependable hands one of the Foreign Office's most trusted men, a splendid fellow named Kim Philby.)
As filmmaking, however, it's well up to the standards of the Boultings' other films of the period, immaculately shot on location by Gilbert Taylor (and giving pride of place in a slam-bang climax to my favourite London landmark, Battersea power station), wittily scripted and flavourfully acted by an enormous cast of familiar British faces (including Andre Morell returning as Supt. Folland from 'Seven Days to Noon').
Just as ten years earlier wartime British films had exaggerated the extent of activity by wartime British fifth columnists, so the organised sabotage depicted here is rather fanciful. But the Portland spy case ten years later proved 'High Treason's depiction of spies in suburbia was spot on, while the defection of Burgess & Maclean the very year the film was released would eventually blow the lid off just how high within the British establishment the Kremlin's influence had reached - as this film insinuates in the unctuous form of the urbanely treacherous Grant Mansfield. (At that very moment a joint British & American operation to incite a popular revolt against the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania was meeting with failure after catastrophic failure costing the lives of over 300 agents because operational matters had been placed in the dependable hands one of the Foreign Office's most trusted men, a splendid fellow named Kim Philby.)