Counterpoint: The U-2 Story (review)

- reduced the price to L30. - reintroduced a Standing Order facility at the reduced price of L25 In the future we are confident we can improve the publication date and expect to publish the 1979 International Index to Film Periodicals by August 1980. FIAF is convinced ofthe Index's value as a unique film reference tool and is confident that libraries and archives all over the world will continue to buy it. We do need your help to bring to everyone's attention the fact that we are now publishing the Index, and that all orders from 1 972 onwards should be sent to the London office ofFIAF where they will be serviced quickly. FIAF 90-94 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WIV 7DH, England 01-734 4221. Frances Thorpe' Editor ARMY ARCHIVE SEEKS MATERIALS The Military History Institute's Audio Visual Archives (Carlisle Barracks, PA 3 701 3) was established in September 1 977. The Audio Visual Archives is the Army's repository for unofficial, historically significant audio visual materials pertaining to the military experience ofthe United States. The primary missions are to preserve audio visual materials and to make these sources of information available for research by civilian and military scholars; also to the general public. If you would like to donate audio visual materials or to gain information concerning our holdings, you can contact SSG Thomas M. Allen, Acting Chief, Audio Visual Archives by writing to the above address or calling (717) 245-3601. FILM REVIEW Counterpoint: The U-2 Story (1973) Color, 58 minutes. The netherworld of the secret agent is invariably an irresistible theme for moviemakers. Films have usually endowed that uncertain and lonely existence with the glamour ofindependence, the intrigue ofthe double life, above all, with the exhilaration ofadventure. Peter Davis, in his 1973 documentary on the U-2 spy incident in 1960, explores instead the ruined lives ofthe two key agents, the American Francis Gary Powers, who flew photographic spy missions for the CIA, and the Norwegian Selmer Nielsen, who monitored the activities at the NATO air base in Bodo, Norway. The film reconstructs the story in considerable detail, intercutting extensive interviews with the two men with film clips and newsreels ofthe period. According to Davis, it was Nielsen who alerted the Soviets to the exact time and route ofPowers' final flight over Soviet territory. Yet Davis is less interested in the U-2 episode per se than in the public passions ofthe Cold War, and how they twisted the lives oftwo men that served them. With the ironic hindsight ofa later era, this tale of Cold War hysteria is presented as a sort of solemn farce. The week before the 1960 summit conference between Eisenhower, Khrushchev, DeGaulle, and Macmillan, Powers is brought down within 14 Soviet territory. The United States issues an explanation that the Utility-2, equipped with advanced photographic and electronic devices, was an unarmed civilian plane, whose pilot had lost oxygen and thus had inadvertently violated Soviet airspace as the plane "drifted" over the boundary. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko suggests, in response, that perhaps the crews of all American jets "wandering" into Soviet territory had difficulties with their oxygen supply. Eisenhower later admits that the U-2 was, in fact, a spy mission; the 1960 Summit Meeting, in any event, is not a marked success. In spite oftheir roles on opposite sides ofthis drama, the lives of Powers and Nielsen are less in counterpoint than curious parallels. Both, with the blessings oftheir families, began their espionage careers at young ages: Nielsen, whose family had worked with the Russians against the Nazis, is sent to Russia at the age of 17; Powers, whose coal miner father is rescued from poverty in the 3 930s by a government job, joins the Air Force in college, and several years later is recruited by the CIA to fly the new U-2 jet. -After their respective trials as spies (Powers in the Soviet Union, Nielsen in Norway), both are viewed as traitors by their own countrymen. Powers returns home from a Soviet prison to be asked why he did not commit suicide, rather than betray his country (although the film shows that he never "gave...