The Mackintosh Man

After The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Huston reteamed with Paul Newman for this labyrinthine spy thriller scripted by legendary action director Walter Hill. A free-floating British secret agent goes undercover to extract a high-profile Soviet defector from his Parliament seat in what turned out to be one of Huston’s last reckonings with the espionage film. It’s a movie willfully out of time—when it hit theaters, the U.S. was enjoying unusually cordial relations with the USSR—and, in the end, a nostalgic love letter from a filmmaker to a genre in which he had a major stake.