(Indeed, Lockhart quotes Ian Fleming as once saying that Bond, after all, "is not a Sidney Reilly, you know.")īond probably was loosely based on Reilly, though, and what makes Reilly so very powerful as drama-as Bond is not-is Reilly's presence in the midst of real world affairs: the Russo-Japanese war, which he probably started his theft of German armament secrets and, in 1905, his smuggling of Russian surveys of Middle Eastern oil deposits to England. Next to Reilly's mostly true escapades-bedroom or workplace-James Bond fades to lighter shades of pale. He was brilliant, multilingual, totally without scruples. The series, done against a lavish and meticulous Edwardian backdrop, is based on a book by Robin Bruce Lockhart about the man who revolutionized Britain's espionage network, started a war or two, bigamously married at least three and possibly as many as 11 women, kept dozens more as mistresses, killed with as much e'lan as he dined and very nearly undid the Russian Revolution. The first of the 12-part "Reilly: Ace of Spies" begins tonight at 9 on Channel 26, appropriately a feature of "Mystery!" because mysterious is the one thing everyone can agree on about Reilly. Whatever else Sidney (probably ne' Sigmund Rosenblum) Reilly was or wasn't, his improbable but probably true story makes some of the best TV we've imported from Great Britain since "Upstairs, Downstairs." "Reilly," sniffs one of his clubby colleagues in the ultraclubby British Secret Service of King Edward's day, "is not a gentleman.
0 kommentar(er)
