A film editing error
A couple of week sago I went to see Bridge of Spies, a film based on factual events recounting the swap of convicted Soviet Spy Rudolph Abel for U.S. U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. The film stars Tom Hanks in the role of James Donovan, a New York Attorney, who is pressed into defending Abel when he is caught by the FBI, and is later enlisted by the CIA to negotiate the swap. The time is the late fifties and early sixties: the early days of the late and unlamented Cold War.
Over the weekend, I bought a DVD copy of the film to add to my collection of such films. Last night I viewed it again,
As the story develops, in 1962, Donovan (Hanks) is on his way to the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin in bitter cold weather when he is stripped of his overcoat by some street thugs.
In the Embassy he talks with a man who claims to be only a Second Secretary, but we learn later is the KGB chief in Germany, who makes fun of the lost coat. He gives Donovan the address of an East German lawyer named Wolfgang Vogel, representing an East German woman who claims to be the wife of Abel.
In the meeting with Vogel, Donovan is wearing his stolen overcoat. Later when he is back in the CIA safe house nursing a cold, sipping tea, and wrapped in a blanket he asks the CIA chief to get him a coat since he lost his own doing “spy stuff.” For the rest of the film he wears a new coat.
Obviously, as is often the case, scenes were short out of sequence to be later put together in the editing process, and something like this should have been caught by the editors and the scene probably re-shot. It doesn’t materially affect the fine film that Steven Spielberg has produced but it is an interesting oddity.
Mark Rylance plays the role of Abel, and for his performance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor this past Sunday night.
The Abel for Powers swap was only one incident in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, but this exciting film helps us to understand the dangerous times the Cold War presented for the world.
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