Review
Pack of Lies
by Jeff Jarvis
People Weekly

April 27, 1987. This great 1983 play by Hugh (Concealed Enemies) Whitemore started in London, went to Broadway and now comes to TV in an elegantly restrained adaptation. "Pack of Lies" is a true spy story with no cloaks, no daggers, only ordinary people in a London suburb. Ellen Burstyn plays a stiff and mousy housewife who adores her tea klatches with the loud but lovable American lady across the street, Teri Garr. Then an agent of British intelligence, Alan Bates, comes to see Burstyn. He wants to use her home so he can snoop on Garr's house and on the mysterious stranger who visits there: a KGB spy. Soon everyone is smudged with dirty secrets; everyone lies. Burstyn resists the urge to give us an easy overdose of angst. Garr keeps herself from bubbling over. And Bates makes his spy-catcher not only silky but also slithery. Director Anthony (Second Serve) Page gets the best out of the stars, the fine supporting cast and the script, letting this story build to a surprisingly powerful punch. How good it is to see a TV movie that can be serious without diatribes or diseases. Grade: A

Review
'Lies' Spies Like Us
by Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 25, 1987. "Pack of Lies," the CBS Sunday night movie, has trenchant and affecting things to say about friendship, trust and deceit, but it's a pity its plot isn't resolved along more satisfying lines. It can't be, because the film is derived from a true story that does not end cheerfully.

Fact-based dramas continue to proliferate in television. One might prefer less fact and more drama when faced with a downer like the denouement at hand here.

A Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, the movie tells of two moderately affluent couples, one British and one supposedly Canadian, who become fast friends in a quiet London neighborhood in the early '60s. The two wives grow especially close. One is shy and introverted, the other a gregarious sprite.

Then a dour gray functionary from the government shows up. "We need your help on a very delicate matter," he murmurs. By hook if not by crook, he slowly convinces one couple to begin spying on the other -- on grounds that the other might well be spies themselves.

Ralph Gallup's script, from a play by Hugh Whitemore, concentrates on the tensions and traumas that this unsavory arrangement creates for Barbara Jackson, the woman who does the peeping. Ellen Burstyn plays the part, gravitating toward the mad scenes, wherein she essentially reprises her "Exorcist" hysterics. There's lots of sniffling and some lower-lip biting.

Burstyn is supposed to be British, and so she adopts an on-again, off-again British accent. Why in heaven's name didn't they just hire a British actress? They shot the thing on location in England; there must have been a few around. Burstyn is distracting just when she should be most believable.

But that versatile charmer Teri Garr plays Helen Schaefer, the suspected espionage agent across the street, and as usual, she's effortlessly captivating, though this time with a sly, spooky undercurrent. Helen is a likable chatterbox whose aggressive chumminess at first seems kind, then peculiar, then sinister. Garr is usually praised for her light comic roles, but again, in "Lies," she shows depth and complexity.

Alan Bates, seedy in a charismatically furtive, LeCarre way, plays Mr. Stewart, the counterintelligence agent who moves in with the Jacksons and supervises the surveillance. Sammi Davis (yes, really) has her moments as the Jacksons' daughter, kept in the dark by her parents all along, and then justifiably appalled when the plot is revealed to her.

Now about that plot. Are the Schaefers indeed foreign agents who regularly entertain a member of the KGB or is it all some horrible mistake? If this were an Alfred Hitchcock picture, the latter would be more likely. Indeed, the prosaic London setting, the ambiguity of villains and heroes, and a healthy suspense quotient suggest Hitchcock in his "Man Who Knew Too Much" mood.

Director Anthony Page seems almost to be emulating the master in the tidy, methodical way he builds tension. The web tightens persuasively, and the moral issues are raised subtly and credibly.

The way the story is resolved is not a consummation devoutly to be wished, however, and it gets worse still with a sorrowful voice-over postscript. That's the trouble with truth; fiction tends to be so much neater. Though it hardly sends one away happy, "Pack of Lies" is certainly serious and respectable. And it's particularly noteworthy as an intriguing, troubling entry in the what-would-you-do genre. When it comes to our neighbors, we all have our little suspicions. "Pack of Lies" shows how much more complicated life could get should the suspicions be confirmed.

copyright The Washington Post, 1987