As a result, Max is released from prison. They claim she handed British secrets on atomic weaponry over to the Soviet. Kim Philby is often regarded as Britains most notorious double agent but these documents reveal the Russians valued a secretary from Bexleyheath named Melita Norwood far higher. Red Joan had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2018 and was released on 19 April 2019, by Lionsgate in the United Kingdom. Director: Trevor Nunn. Then one sunlit spring morning there is a knock on . In one revealing and historically quite plausible scene, several of the CP students read aloud, at a campus meeting, excerpts of the fraudulent confessions of Russian Bolsheviks Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, from the first of the infamous Moscow Trials, in 1936. The revelations came as a total surprise to Norwood's daughter, Anita Ferguson, who didnt find out her mother was a spy until she read about it in the paper. In one scene, Labour leader Clement Attlee, the future prime ministerreflecting the tension between the allies as Washington makes its dominance clear after entering the warvoices his concern that the Yanks will control everything unless the scientists working under the direction of the British authorities make their own progress. When the Independent Labour Party split in 1936, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. So when she passes a student rally for the Spanish Republic, she stops to listen. As always you can unsubscribe at any time. I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany. She added that, in general, I do not agree with spying against one's country.. Joan winces and expresses her disapproval. Its through her close relationship with Leo, and his tendency towards grandiose statements about civilization, that Joan begins to understand the world as made up of people rather than rather than glorious buildings and monuments. Joans insistence that knowledge of nuclear weapon should be shared, as she explains it, calls to mind the attitude of both J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who is among those credited with being the father of the atomic bomb, and Albert Einstein, the Nobel Prize-winning genius of modern physics. All Rights Reserved. Joan, a standout student, graduates and goes to work at Tube Alloys, the code-named firm that is engaged in a British version of the US Manhattan Project, as the wartime allies pursue, at least for the moment, independent efforts to develop nuclear weapons. When he lovingly strokes her face throughout the film calling her my little comrade, she doesnt object, but also doesnt appear to grasp its meaning. Red Joan raises very crucial and complex historical problems. But did she really commit those crimes and give away Britains secrets to the Russians as a KGB spy in the 1930s? While the real Melita Norwood was also staunchly anti-nuclear the same Times article notes anti-war and nuclear disarmament stickers in her windows for the onscreen version, Joan, it's the main reason she participates in spying, to balance the odds in the Russian-American arms race. Melita Norwood was a great-grandmother when her espionage was finally revealed. The main thing she gets out of it, however, is to see a fiery young man named Leo speaking, with whom she is smitten. After the Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb in 1949, Max is arrested by Scotland Yard and is charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. TV icon Sonya Eddy starred as Epiphany Johnson on General Hospital for 16 unforgettable years. The charges? The Russians had been struggling to find a solution to an issue they were having with creating the atomic bomb when Norwood found the answer. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. People over 40 tend to see themselves as about 20% younger than their actual age., Ronald Radosh is a professor emeritus of history at CUNY, and the author and co-author of many books, including. The film, directed by Trevor Nunn, formerly the artistic director for the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre in the UK, and, currently, the Theatre Royal Haymarket, utilizes flashbacks in which the elderly Joan (Judi Dench), under interrogation by detectives, begins discussing her youth, which is then depicted on screen. [6] Sonya and Leo Galich are cousins, but the former grew up with the latter after she was orphaned and their relationship is more like that of a brother and a sister. She is quiet, studious, demure, inexperienced. The film portrays Norwood as a doddering old woman that when unmasked struggles to understand what she did wrong and what is happening to her. In the film, Joan is depicted as a conventional, patriotic and not particularly political young woman who was a serious student of physics when she attended Cambridge University. Agent Hola's time was up. The real reason Norwood, Hall and others made their personal pacts with the devil was because they considered the Soviet Union to be the future of humanity and that under Stalins leadership, communism would be established everywhere. Norwood was a dedicated Communist from a Communist family: her father was the first person in Britain to translate Lenins writings into English. Joan falls in love with Max, but their relationship ends when Max tells her that he wants Joan as his wife, not his mistress, but, because of Britain's strict divorce laws, he is unable to divorce his wife. She would then take a photo using a spy camera which she'd pass on to her KGB handler, having returned the documents back to the safe. Joan is recruited to work for the wartime Tube Alloys project to build an atomic bomb for Britain and meets the scientist, Max. The film ends with the information, conveyed on screen, that Joan Stanley was not prosecuted. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby were a group of disaffected undergraduates at Cambridge University who began spying for the Soviet Union during the Second World War. She appears in the flashbacks about what really happened in 1938. I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as Nazi Germany developed. Norwood had to give up her studies in Latin and logic at a Southampton university. The eighties chart-topper was barely recognisable with her trademark red hair in tight curls and heavy blue eye makeup.. The historian David Burke writes that the information [Norwood] supplied on the behavior of uranium metal at high temperatures permitted the Soviet Union to test an atomic bomb four years earlier than British and American intelligence thought possible. In his book, the British expert on espionage, Christopher Andrew, writes that Norwood was both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain. The KGB described her, Andrew writes, as a committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance., Speaking to the press in front of her modest home, Norwood explained that she did not consider what she was doing as spying against her country, saying, I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service. Staff at the American embassy were not convinced by his story but he was able to meet with MI6 representatives at the British embassy, who were astonished to discover the material, detailing the innermost machinations of Soviet intelligence. Hall was such an unrepentant traitor that he didnt even have to be recruited. 6. Red Joan is a 2018 British spy drama film, directed by Trevor Nunn, from a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero. Mona Maund, one of the first female MI5 agents, actually identified Norwood as a possible spy back in the 1930s, when Norwood was at the beginning of her espionage career. This Joan arrives at Cambridge in 1938 to study physics. Standing in her suburban front garden in 87-year-old pensioner Melita Norwood read from a crisp sheet of paper, intently looking down the lens of a camera as she confessed to being a top secret spy and betraying her country. We later learn that Leos cousin, Sonya, is a top Soviet agent herself, working to recruit others into an espionage network. Whats interesting is the way that it fantasises that story. Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and her cousin Leo (Tom Hughes), two German Jews, lead Joan into a world of dark-roomed film screenings and heated discussions of Soviet political purges, where, of course, only Joan is wise enough to question Soviet propaganda. The system she was referring to was Communism. Red Sonja: Directed by Richard Fleischer. The socialist. Instead, Nunns film works better as a period melodrama and I dont mean this as a slight at all. . Norwood admitted she'd sometimes be typing up notes from meetings and then "typed an extra copy" to send on. Another creative angel left the planet. As the old Joan settles into an interrogation session in a drab room (and repeatedly denies every accusation), the films lengthy flashbacks chart Joans opinionated past in thoughtful increments. She is somewhat sympathetic to the left, or course. Norwood was the most important British female agent in the whole of the KGB's history as well as the longest-serving of all the Soviet spies in Britain. It was a mere two years later that Norwood was spying for the Soviet NKVD - she'd been recruited by Rothstein himself. They fall in love, while trying to raise money for Spain. Through them she begins attending some student political meetings. It Has Been Since the Beginning. More than fifty years later, admitting her role in passing classified information, Joan reads a statement to the assembled media outside her home, explaining and defending her actions by saying that the horror of another world war had to be averted. While Judi Dench is flawless in bringing time-spanning depth to her melancholic character (with accidental nods to her infamous M persona), her contemporary segments are comparably bland by narrative design. Dame Judy Dench stars as the KGB's longest serving British spy in 'Red Joan', Melita Norwood reads a statement in her garden, which she had lovingly tended, Judi Dench plays an older Joan Stanley, who is based on Norwood, Melita Norwood aged 87 when she faced the cameras, Sophie Cookson plays Joan Stanley, who is based on Norwood, The former British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association building in central London, Norwood read her statement, surrounded by the garden that she loved so much. (Image: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images), Dame Judi Dench as the older Joan Stanley in the film. Norwood joined Southampton University but dropped out and moved to Germany at the time of the rise of the Nazis. It would be too easy to dismiss the romantic entanglements of Red Joan as fluff, but along with screenwriter Shapero, Nunn treats Joans affairs with the respect they deserve, while never losing sight of her as an intellectual. Copyright 2023, Bulwark Media. 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