Red Joan

Over the years we have been running any film starring Judi Dench has always been popular, and so it proved with Red Joan. The reviews had not been brilliant but it was an enjoyable film with some excellent performances, and it was good to see a story about Cambridge spies that did not overtly refer to Burgess and Maclean.

Red Joan

UK 2018          101 minutes

Director:          Trevor Nunn

Starring:            Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Tom Hughes

“This 40s period piece tootles picturesquely along like a cold war, heterosexual version of The Imitation Game, the biopic of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. There is the same prestige Britpic furniture: clipped vowels, kindly officer-class boffins, sexy smoulderers, brilliant women patronised by pipe-smoking, pint-quaffing chaps, illicit (straight) relationships in cramped rooms with a sixpence for the meter.”

Peter Bradshaw

The peaceful retirement of Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is disrupted when she is taken into custody after MI5 discover that in the past she provided intelligence to the KGB. In 1938 a young Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) is studying physics at Cambridge where she falls for a young communist called Leo Galich (Tom Hughes). After graduating Joan is offered a job at a weapons research facility and as the nuclear arms race accelerates she has to decide what she would do to secure peace in the world.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney which was inspired by the life of Melita Norwood, a member of the Woolwich Spy Ring, who supplied nuclear secrets to the USSR while working for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association and thus helped the Soviet development of nuclear weapon technology. In reality Norwood spent a year studying Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton rather than physics at Cambridge, but the change makes a notional link with the Cambridge Spy Ring that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

Trevor Nunn has had a long career in the theatre where he has served as Artistic Director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre as well as directing a series of globally successful musicals such as Cats and Les Miserables. He has also worked in television and to a lesser extent in cinema, although most of his work for television has been to produce screen versions of his own successful stage productions. For the cinema prior to Red Joan he has directed only three films in over more than 40 years: Hedda (1975) with Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler; Lady Jane (1986) which gave an early starring role to Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Jane Grey; and Twelfth Night (1996) which starred Imogen Stubbs, Nunn’s then wife, and Helena Bonham Carter in leading roles.

Here's the trailer: