Overpaid, Over-armed and Over excited

The dangerous American in ‘80s movies

Let me start with a public service announcement: you must not, under any circumstances, watch the 1983 film The Jigsaw Man. I realise you weren’t even considering it, but when I tell you the climatic scene is a three-way gun fight between Robert ‘Jesus’ Powell, Charles ‘Rocky Horror’ Gray and Michael Caine set in the Woburn Safari Park baboon enclosure, you might think, ‘well, that sounds brilliant’. You might look at IMDb and notice that it stars both Laurence Olivier and Max Bygraves, and was photographed by Freddie Francis, the cinematographer on David Lynch’s Elephant Man and Dune. ‘Maybe it’s so bad it’s good’, you’ll think. 

It’s not. It’s so bad, it’s rubbish. One of the more ludicrous bits is a training montage in which Michael Caine’s KGB handlers teach him to do an Austin Powers Judo CHOP.

Michael Caine is playing a man who has been given plastic surgery to look like Michael Caine. The reason for this is that Caine is playing a disgraced ex-head of MI6 who betrayed his service and defected to the Russians. This character is called Philip Kimberley.

In other words The Jigsaw Man is an attempt to repackage the story of Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies as an exciting spy romp. It is directed, after all, by Terence Young, who also directed Dr No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965). The Jigsaw Man doesn’t want to exonerate Philby; it simply wants us to see his betrayal of friends, country and morality as a splendid caper. The Cold War is reduced to a game played between Oxbridge cruciverbalists and Moscow Centre boot boys. The whole thing seems to be saying: it wouldn’t do to take the whole thing too seriously, like those dreadfully gauche Americans do. Given that Philby’s treachery ruined the reputation of the British Secret Intelligence Service with their allies for a generation, it is telling that The Jigsaw Man hardly mentions the Americans at all. If it had mentioned them, you can bet it would have made use of one of two stereotypes that pervaded the British mindset in the early ‘80s, or more likely both at once.

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The first stereotype was that the CIA was both omnipotent and ruthless, toppling elected governments all over the world in the paradoxical defence of democracy. These are the villains of the 1982 Chris Mullins novel A Very British Coup which became a hit mini-series on Channel 4 in 1988. Socialist Harry Perkins is elected Prime Minister in a landslide but is conspired against by right wing forces in the British establishment and military. Behind them, the CIA provides funds, intelligence and encouragement.

Mullins was almost certainly thinking about the various rumours of plots against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but the Leader of the Opposition in the early ‘80s – and the person most likely to institute a viscerally left-wing government – was Michael Foot, whom double agent Oleg Gordievsky had claimed was the beneficiary of KGB money. In his book The Spy and the Traitor (2018), Ben Macintyre says that, to their credit, the security services determined that Foot had never betrayed state secrets and decided to keep the allegations to themselves for fear of meddling in the democratic process, unlike the spies of A Very British Coup.

The other American stereotype can be seen in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (also 1983). An American oil company representative, who happens to have a Scottish-sounding surname, is sent to the west coast of Scotland to scout the site for a new refinery that will require the complete destruction of the fishing village of Ferness. The residents of the village are, of course, delighted: the Americans are about to pay them all vast amounts of money to move somewhere more exciting. But inevitably the American high-flyer, with his penthouse and Porsche and digital watch, falls in love with the slower, quirkier Scottish way of life, one that is so divorced from the hard realities of Cold War that they welcome the captain of a Soviet trawler into their ceilidh. 

This British ‘80s view of Americans endows them with money and power, but no sense; no idea what to do with any of it. They are giant toddlers, full of go-getting energy but with exactly the wrong notion of what they should be going to get. They are desperately in need of hard-won, old world wisdom.

At the end of Local Hero the village is not only saved but is given a funding windfall, mostly thanks to eccentric oil boss Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster). Happer encapsulates the meeting of these two stereotypes. He is quite willing to travel about the world carelessly destroying people’s lives to maximise shareholder return, but he is also consumed by a dreamy, innocent enthusiasm. In his case his obsession is with the stars, an obsession he shares with an old man who lives on Ferness beach (Fulton Mackay; this is your chance to see Wyatt Earp share a scene with Mr Mackay of Slade Prison.) 

Happer’s fervent nuttiness is a combination of the two stereotypes and in this is a milder version of the ultimate bugbear of Cold War movies, the fervent American nut who is going to start World War III. This character is a descendant of the deranged generals of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), and he was still haunting ‘80s cinema in the form of Martin Sheen’s deranged Presidential candidate Stillson in Dead Zone (1983). The Dead Zone is the story of a psychic, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), who sees visions whenever he touches someone. When he shakes Stillson’s hand on a walkabout, he discovers that the man is planning to start a nuclear war with the intent of wiping Soviet Russia out.

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To be thirteen in 1983 was a weird experience. In that heated adolescent moment when you were starting to figure out what kind of adult you might turn out to be, you were equally certain that you would never reach adulthood anyway. You were triply powerless, not only as a mystified and terrified child, and also not only as an individual caught up in the insane politics of the arms race, but also as a Briton, a mere onlooker to this psychodrama of global titans. But the madnesses of this mutually assured destruction were different. The Russians seemed sunk in a robotic depression, but the Americans and their fervent nuttiness seemed psychotic.

What I’m saying is this: while the Russians may have been the ‘enemy’ in the Cold War, the Americans were the danger. By the early ‘80s Soviet leaders had become one long May Day parade of nearly-dead apparatchiks; the Communist system looked simply sclerotic. They seemed incapable of doing anything so dynamic as destroying the world. The Americans, on the other hand – so full of that naive enthusiasm – seemed positively frightening, especially from the point of view of Western Europe, which was likely to be Ground Zero for World War III. It is no coincidence that Professor Falken – the disillusioned scientist whose artificial intelligence almost starts nuclear war in WarGames (1983) – is played by a Brit, John Wood. He represents the European opinion that the real risk lay with the American generals, the people who credibly believed they might ‘win’ a nuclear war.

This image of Americans was deeply bound up with movies; but it was not confined to them. 1983 was also a year of Star Wars, both on the screen (with Return of the Jedi) and off, with President Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defence Initiative. SDI was intended to be a missile defence system that would allegedly render intercontinental nuclear weapons obsolete.  Consequently, it deeply alarmed Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. ‘Star Wars’ was the perfect nickname for it. Return of the Jedi was a prime example of how the image projected by the American cultural hegemony affected how they were perceived abroad. The simplistic morality and gung-ho militarism of the Star Wars films was a straightforward update of old Westerns, all white hats, black hats and manifest destiny. 

There was already a sense that Reagan’s past as a Hollywood actor had confused the distinction between fiction and reality in America’s conception of itself, that the cynicism of ‘70s New Hollywood was being replaced by a new mythology of heroic capitalism and gun-toting justice. The stereotype of the cheerfully lethal American, dangerously innocent of the political realities of the world, was resurgent. Andropov, an ex-head of the KGB and a deeply paranoid player of politburo politics, certainly bought into it. Slightly too much.

1983 was the moment when the Cold War threatened to become hot. Despite our perceptions of American potency, in this time of maximum danger it was two Russians who demonstrated power and control, and possibly saved the world. In September, Russian Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov refused to trigger retaliatory strikes in response to what his computer (wrongly) told him was an American missile launch. And in November, when the NATO war game Able Archer tripped Andropov’s well-established paranoia into full-blown lunacy, it was double agent Oleg Gordievsky who revealed how seriously the higher echelons in Moscow were misreading the exercises. 

It’s kind of amazing, looking back, that – although us poor dumb civilians knew nothing of any of this at the time – both situations had already been imagined by pieces of popular culture. The alert Petrov overrode was triggered, it’s believed, by the reflection of the sun; Nena’s totemic 1983 song ‘99 Red Balloons’ imagines an alert triggered by balloons (‘Panic bells, it’s red alert! There’s something here from somewhere else!’) And the plot of WarGames is very similar to how Able Archer actually played out. Or perhaps it’s not so surprising, given how much time we all spent obsessing over the scenarios in which we might die in a thermonuclear fireball. 

Maybe there really are only so many ways these things can happen, and only so many ways they can go. Fresh off Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), a piece of (almost) gung-ho militarism detailing a struggle over control of a weapon of mass destruction, Nicholas Meyer signed on to direct The Day After (1983), a harrowing depiction of the effects of nuclear war on the civilian population that apparently had a profound effect on President Reagan.

Perhaps the worst thing about The Jigsaw Man is its refusal to take the Cold War seriously. It is one thing to have thrilling fun with James Bond; it is quite another to suggest that Kim Philby was just having a bit of a laugh. At least there were some people actively ensuring that we could live in a world where we could choose never to watch The Jigsaw Man.

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For more on how the British saw America in the ‘80s, try our piece on a couple of time travelling doctors and their teenage companions in ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Back to the Future’: