User Reviews

I caught most of this on a well known UK vintage film channel.

I give plot spoilers because I can't review it without doing so.

George Cole plays a plumber who is confused for an atomic scientist by the USSR.

He is kidnapped to Moscow.

In the great tradition of this sort of film he falls in love with Nadia Gray who plays a Soviet spy.

I don't know Gray well as an actor but she was an exotic beauty.

Some other reviewer on here is upset by the portrayal of British communists in this film.

Well having known a few British Stalinist I think the portrayal is fair,you Jeremy Corbyn types ,cranks as written about by George Orwell.

The portrayal of British communists as mainly middle class cranks is similar to that in High Treason another obscure British cold war film.

Oscar Homolka plays a KGB chief long before the Harry Palmer films.

One thing I especially liked about the film is trying to guess where in Britain the Soviet locations were.

I guess that Moscow airport was Speke in Liverpool.

Although this is a comedy it is clear that the USSR shown in the film is a cruel place.

George Cole plays a "sanitary engineer" who, by mistake, grabs the plans for a new atomic device developed in the same company where he works and goes on holiday. Through a series of misunderstandings, he finds himself in Russia where he is greeted as a scientist who got tired of capitalism and will offer his services to communism. This mild Cold War comedy throws satirical barbs at both sides of the fence (the West being represented by England this time), but doesn't have enough laughs. Oscar Homolka, as the "comrade" who recruits Cole, is fine, and Nadia Gray, as a Russian translator who's assigned to watch over Cole, brightens up every scene she's in, but they both have too little screen time. All in all, a rather forgettable time-passer. ** out of 4.

This film was made by the Zampi Brothers who made some very amusing British comedies. However this does not rank with the best of them.

George Cole seems to have a permanently dazed look about him. This seems to rather disarm the Russians in general and Oskar Hamolka in particular. He even gets to meet Uncle Joe,this is before the scale of his murderous paranoia was well known.

The problem is that having a bewildered look on your face does not make a film funny. You need to have a funny script and that is just what this film does not have. A few chuckles but no out and out belly laughs. Coles stunt man performs well at the end.