Double Agents (film)


Double Agents, also known as Night Encounter, is a 1959 mystery film co-written and directed by Robert Hossein.
A French-Italian co-production, it is based on the novel La Nuit des espions by Robert Chazal. It entered the main competition at the 20th edition of the Venice Film Festival.

Cast

Reception

from L'Express described the film as "a Pirandellian idea tinged with existentialism, and all drowned in an incredibly naive pathos, full of the humanism of a first communicant, with a lyricism that borders on bad taste".
Jean-Louis Tallenay from Signes Du Temps wrote: "two fascinating faces, an original subject, a skillfully created atmosphere. But a confusion of ideas, an uncertainty in the direction of the actors and an affectation in the framing explain the rather cold reception given to the film".
Bianco e Nero's film critic wrote: "On one hand, it seems like a story in the style of Hitchcock, poised between emotion and deception; yet it lacks Hitchcock's skill in construction and his talent for thematic variations. On the other hand, one gets the impression that Hossein aimed much higher — for an "absolute", passionate love story set under exceptional circumstances", noting that "Hossein would certainly have liked to create his own Hiroshima mon amour. But the "necessity" of inspiration — the purity of the poetic condition — is entirely absent here".