Saturday Afternoon
August 28, 2021
on NetFlix
2019 [R] 1 h 40 m
CAST: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Nina Sosanya
GENRES: Spy Movies, Social Issue Dramas, British
THIS MOVIE IS: Inspiring
When an unassuming elderly widow is arrested for reason, her tangled secret past as the KGB’s longest-serving British spy is exposed. In this increasingly unpredictable world in which the acquisition of acting roles is more difficult than it used to be for ageing actors, many such people in their 80s would have definitely hung up their costumes by now, basking in a certain serenity that comes with retirement. Not Dame Judi. She marches on defiant, making her latest turn in Trevor Nunn’s Red Joan. The film is based on the true life story of Melita Norwood, a British civil servant who spent the Second World War and many of the Cold War years sending intelligence to the Russians, and who was exposed as a Communist spy in the late 1990s. In the film, Norwood is given the pseudonym Joan Stanley, incarnated by both Judi Dench (the later years) and the very promising Sophie Cookson (the early years).