cia film films interesting m movie movies random review/film school to-watch todo watchlist

My tags:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (January 2008)

The Good Shepherd
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert De Niro
Produced by	James G. Robinson Robert De Niro Jane Rosenthal Francis Ford Coppola
Written by	Eric Roth
Starring	Matt Damon Angelina Jolie William Hurt Alec Baldwin Robert De Niro Billy Crudup Michael Gambon Timothy Hutton Joe Pesci John Turturro
Music by	Bruce Fowler Marcelo Zarvos
Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Editing by	Tariq Anwar
Studio	Morgan Creek TriBeCa Productions American Zoetrope
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	December 22, 2006
Running time	167 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$85 million
Gross revenue	$100,252,761 (worldwide)

The Good Shepherd is a 2006 spy film directed by Robert De Niro and starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, with an extensive supporting cast. Although it is a fictional film loosely based on real events, it is advertised as telling the untold story of the birth of counter-intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a Morgan Creek Productions film distributed by Universal Pictures. The film's main character, Edward Wilson (portrayed by Matt Damon), is loosely based on James Jesus Angleton and Richard M. Bissell.^{[citation needed]} William Hurt's character, Phillip Allen, is largely based on Allen Dulles,^{[citation needed]} while General Bill Sullivan, played by Robert De Niro, is loosely based on Major General William Joseph Donovan.^{[citation needed]}. The Archibald Cummings character is loosely based on British spy and double agent, Kim Philby.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Production 4 Historical accuracy 4.1 Bay of Pigs leak 4.2 WWII announcement timing 5 Reaction 6 Sequels 7 References to other fictional espionage works 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Plot

In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion into Cuba fails due to an as of yet undisclosed leak. Afterwards, a photograph and an audio recording on reel-to-reel tape are anonymously dropped off at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a senior CIA officer.

The narrative flashes back to 1939: Edward is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that grooms future U.S. leaders. As part of his initiation, Edward must reveal a secret about himself: he reveals that as a young boy, he discovered his father's suicide note. After the ceremony, a fraternity brother tells him that Edward's father, an admiral, was to be chosen as Secretary of the Navy, until his loyalties were questioned. He asks Edward what the suicide note said, and Edward tells him that he never read it.

Shortly after the Skull and Bones ceremony, Edward is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), is a Nazi spy. Edward is asked to help expose the professor, which he does, resulting in Dr. Fredericks' deportation. It is also heavily implied that the professor is homosexual (taboo in this era), and that the professor has an attraction to Edward, which would aid Edward in exposing him.

Edward begins a relationship with a hearing-impaired student named Laura (Tammy Blanchard). However, while attending a Skull and Bones retreat on Deer Island, Edward meets Margaret 'Clover' Russell (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister. General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro), who is not a member of the Skull and Bones Society, asks Edward to join the OSS, offering him a post in London. Soon after, Clover aggressively seduces Edward, and they have sex in the woods behind the Skull and Bones club house.

A few months later, while Edward and Laura are at the beach, Clover's brother arrives and privately talks to him. The brother reveals Clover is pregnant with Edward's child and asks if he will "do what is expected." Laura, able to read lips, sees this and walks away. Edward marries Clover, and during the wedding reception, a U.S. Army courier arrives, reiterating General Sullivan's offer for a position at the OSS London office. Edward accepts, whereupon the courier then hands over his orders, requiring him to be in England in one week. Clover is to remain in the US. To his surprise, Edward's former professor, Dr. Fredericks, is also in London; he is actually a British intelligence operative. While at Yale, he had sought to infiltrate a Nazi organization, causing the American authorities to suspect he was a Nazi spy. Edward's betrayal of his professor ruined two years of espionage work. Despite this, Fredericks recognized Edward's gifts and recommended him to be trained in counter-espionage methods in London.

Soon after, a British intelligence officer, Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), tells Edward that Fredericks' indiscriminate homosexual relationships pose a security risk and asks Edward to deal with his former mentor. As they walk, Fredericks refuses Edward's chivalrous suggestion to protect himself by returning to teaching, and he, in turn, advises Edward to "quit the dirty work . . . while you still have a soul." However, he understands if Edward wants to "tie his shoe" (a signal to watchers that the meeting went badly). Edward delays, which prompts Fredericks to kneel down and tie Edward's shoe for him. As their meeting ends, Fredericks leaves Edward, and, after turning a street corner, is killed and his body dumped into the river.

The timeline moves to post-war Berlin, where the Allies and the Soviets, in a race for technological superiority, are vying to recruit as many German scientists as possible. Edward encounters his Soviet counterpart, codenamed "Ulysses", who praises Edward as a formidable adversary. They and their subordinates meet in a bombed out church in Berlin and exchange scientists to the other side---the Soviets asking for German Nazi and Slavic scientists, while the Americans asking for Jewish scientists.

Edward interviews potential German informants with the aid of a female interpreter, Hanna Schiller (Martina Gedeck), who wears a hearing aid. When Edward makes a rare phone call home, he inadvertently learns from his young son, Edward, Jr., that Clover is seeing another man. After the phone call, Hanna enters Edward's office and invites him to her house. After cooking dinner, she asks him to stay, and they end up having sex. Afterwards, Edward realizes that Hanna can hear him without the use of her hearing aid, exposing her as a Soviet operative who has infiltrated OSS activities. Edward has Hanna killed and notifies Ulysses by having her hearing aid planted into his tea pot.

After six years in London, Edward returns to the United States and is greeted by Clover (who now prefers to be called Margaret). Edward presents his son with a miniature model ship he made that is inside a glass watch casing. He learns from Margaret that her brother was killed in the war, and she confesses that she was seeing another man. When she asks if he had any relationships, Edward replies that, "it was a mistake." She suggests they sleep in separate bedrooms until they become reacquainted, to which Edward agrees. General Sullivan approaches Edward again to help form a new foreign intelligence organisation (the CIA) where Edward will work with his former colleague, Richard Hayes (Lee Pace), under Phillip Allen (William Hurt). Edward accepts, hiding the details about his job from his wife's friends and other acquaintances.

Edward's first assignment deals with an unnamed Central American coffee-growing country where the Russians are trying to gain influence. Edward spots Ulysses in the background of some stock footage of the country's leader, but chooses to conceal this information from others in the room. An agent, also a Skull and Bones member, is sent undercover as a representative of the Mayan coffee company. In order to intimidate the Central American leader, Edward arranges for airplanes to fly over and release locusts during a public event where the Russians (including Ulysses) are present. Edward later receives a can of Mayan coffee, presumably from Ulysses, containing the severed finger of the American agent.

Edward interviews Valentin Mironov, a Russian requesting asylum and claiming to be a high-ranking official who knows Ulysses. While attending the theatre with Mironov and Cummings, Edward unexpectedly encounters his former sweetheart, Laura. Edward and Laura leave the theatre separately, then meet at a restaurant and discuss old times before having sex at Laura's house.

Sometime later when Edward has gone ahead to a Skull and Bones dinner, Margaret anonymously receives photos of Laura and Edward getting into a taxi together and kissing. A distraught Margaret confronts him at the dinner. Edward ends the relationship with Laura by sending her jewelled crucifix to her by messenger, which he had kept from their college romance days.

Edward receives a call from a Soviet defector (Mark Ivanir) claiming that he is the real Valentin Mironov, and the person they know as Valentin is an impostor whose real name is Yuri Modin, a KGB operative working for Ulysses. Edward does not believe him, and agents torture the Russian in an attempt to uncover his true identity. The defector never changes his story. He is beaten, stripped naked, and even endures a form of waterboarding. Eventually, he is administered liquid LSD, because of its alleged truth serum properties, which ultimately causes erratic behavior. But he solidly clings to his stated identity; he calmly states that he is Valentin Mironov and commits suicide by hurling himself through the window to the pavement several stories below. This is apparently based on^{[citation needed]} an actual event when U.S. Army scientist Frank Olson died in a similar way, allegedly as a result of unwittingly participating in CIA-conducted LSD experiments called MKULTRA. The first man claiming to be Mironov, who witnessed the ordeal from behind a two-way mirror with Edward, offers to take LSD to prove his innocence.

Edward visits his son, Edward Jr., at Yale, where he has also joined the Skull and Bones society and has been approached for recruitment by the CIA. Margaret (Clover) pleads with Edward to persuade their son not to accept, but Edward Jr. joins anyway, believing it will bring him closer to his loving, but distant father. This widens the rift between Edward and Margaret, and she eventually leaves him and moves to Arizona to live with her mother. Later, while at a Skull and Bones retreat, Edward discusses the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion with Hayes. Edward Jr. inadvertantly overhears the discussion and a reference to "Bahía de Cochinos", Spanish for "Bay of Pigs." Edward suspects that Edward Jr. may have overheard the conversation and warns his son not to repeat anything that was discussed.

Time passes, and the Bay of Pigs invasion fails. The CIA thoroughly analyzes the photograph (which depicts a Caucasian man and a woman of color making love) and the edited version of the tape that was anonymously dropped at Edward's house earlier in the movie. From visual clues such as the ceiling fan's brand name and the church bells and other sounds heard on the tape, CIA specialists deduce that the photograph may have been taken in Leopoldville, Congo. Edward goes there and finds the room. He realizes that the photograph and tape are of his son Edward Jr. when he sees the model ship in the glass watch casing that he gave his son is sitting on the nightstand; its blurred image was the one object in the photo that the CIA team was unable to identify. Ulysses has apparently been awaiting Edward's arrival. He plays Edward an unedited version of the tape, which reveals that Edward Jr. repeated "Bahía de Cochinos", the classified information he overheard his father discussing, to his lover—a Soviet spy. It is that information that led to the Cubans' and Soviets' knowledge regarding the CIA landing at the Bay of Pigs. Ulysses reveals that the woman spy has truly fallen in love with Edward Jr. Ulysses encourages Edward to spy for the Soviets in exchange for them protecting his son. Edward is non-committal, however; he confronts his son, who says that he is in love with the woman and plans to marry her. When Edward tells him she is a spy, Edward Jr. refuses to believe him.

Edward exposes Valentin as a Soviet spy after finding evidence hidden in the book binding of a copy of Ulysses: inside are a passport with his real name and an escape plan. Arch Cummings is also exposed as a co-conspirator. In an earlier scene, Cummings gave the book to Valentin as a seemingly clever benign gift, playing on Valentin's knowledge about Ulysses, the Soviet spy. Arch Cummings flees to the USSR. After this, while meeting in the Air and Space Museum, Edward declines to run counter-intelligence for the Soviets. Edward explains that the Soviets have won in Cuba and that it is not necessary to hurt his son. Ulysses makes a reference to Edward doing him a future favor, having placed Edward in a compromising position. Ulysses notes of Edward Jr.'s fiancée: "neither of us can be sure about her", and asks Edward, "Do you want her to be part of your family?" Edward says nothing. Shortly after this, Ulysses' aide asks him for change to purchase his daughter a souvenir from the gift shop. Edward asks how much it is, and, upon hearing it is a dollar, hands him a one dollar note, commenting that a cardinal rule of democracy is generosity. This appears to be a reference to a scene from the film's beginning, where a young boy on a bus asks Edward for change for a dollar—when Edward returns to his office, he matches the bill's serial number to a CIA asset codenamed "CARDINAL". So Edward is, in fact, returning the "marked" dollar to the asset, who is Ulysses' aide.

Edward and Margaret arrive separately in the Congo for Edward Jr.'s wedding. His fiancée boards a small plane to travel to the ceremony. In mid-flight, she is thrown out the door by the co-pilot. When she fails to arrive at the church, Edward informs a worried Edward Jr. that his fiancée is dead. Edward Jr. tearfully asks his father if he had anything to do with her death, to which Edward denies any responsibility. Edward Jr. reveals that his fiancée was pregnant; this news shocks and saddens Edward.

Edward then meets with fellow Skull and Bones classmate Hayes (loosely based on Richard Helms) at the new CIA headquarters still under construction. Hayes tells him that Allen is resigning under a cloud of financial improprieties, and that the President has asked him to be the new Director. The President has directed him to do some "house cleaning" and he tells Edward that he needs someone he can trust, saying, "after all, we're still brothers" and that Edward is the "CIA's heart and soul". He then shows Edward a wing of the CIA that will be Edward's "part of the world" and tells him he will be the first head of counter-intelligence.

Edward is then shown opening a floor safe in his closet and pulling out the suicide note that his father, Thomas, had left before killing himself. Edward finally reads the note, in which his father's words reveal that he had betrayed his country. He left loving words for his wife and son, particularly urging the latter to grow up to be a good man, husband, and father and to live a life of decency and truth. Edward burns the note.

The movie ends with Edward leaving his old office moving to his new wing in CIA.

[edit] Cast

Actor	Role
Matt Damon	Edward Wilson
Angelina Jolie	Margaret 'Clover' Russell Wilson
Robert De Niro	Bill Sullivan
Alec Baldwin	Sam Murach
Billy Crudup	Arch Cummings
Tammy Blanchard	Laura
Keir Dullea	Senator John Russell, Sr.
Michael Gambon	Dr. Fredericks
Martina Gedeck	Hanna Schiller
Timothy Hutton	Thomas Wilson
William Hurt	Philip Allen
Gabriel Macht	John Russell, Jr.
Lee Pace	Richard Hayes
Joe Pesci	Joseph Palmi
Eddie Redmayne	Edward Wilson, Jr.
John Sessions	Valentin Mironov #1/Yuri Modin
Oleg Stefan	Ulysses/Stas Siyanko
John Turturro	Ray Brocco
Liya Kebede	Miriam

[edit] Production

Eric Roth^[1] wrote the screenplay in 1994 for Francis Ford Coppola and Columbia Pictures. Coppola left the project because he could not relate to the characters, finding them "unemotional"^{[citation needed]} (although he retained a credit as co-executive producer). Wayne Wang was set to direct but management changes at Columbia ended Wang’s involvement and Philip Kaufman was the next person set to direct but he eventually left the project. When it moved to MGM, John Frankenheimer signed on to make the movie and wanted Robert De Niro to star. Unfortunately, Frankenheimer died in 2002 and at the same time De Niro was developing his own spy story. According to producer Jane Rosenthal, this has been Robert De Niro's pet project for nine years, but it proved difficult to produce in a pre-9/11 world and had to compete with his busy schedule as an actor. The actor said in an interview, “I had always been interested in the Cold War. I was raised in the Cold War. All of the intelligence stuff was interesting to me.”^[2]

De Niro wanted to do a film about the CIA from the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Roth's script ended just after the Bay of Pigs. They ended up making a deal: Roth would write up De Niro's idea into a screenplay if the actor would direct his existing script. If The Good Shepherd proved to be a commercial success then their follow-up would be De Niro's pitch. The project subsequently moved to Universal Pictures where producer Graham King agreed to help finance the $110+ million budget. He had a deal with Leonardo DiCaprio who was interested in playing the film's protagonist Edward Wilson. De Niro planned to shoot the movie in the fall of 2004 but DiCaprio couldn’t do it then because he was making The Departed for Martin Scorsese. King left with him and so did his financial backing. King told Daily Variety, "If the marketplace got better, I'd love to make this movie. It's one of the best scripts I've ever read (but) you can't make the movie for any less than we have it budgeted for. I certainly wouldn't disrespect Bob (De Niro) by getting him to cut the budget of the film." On November 20, 2004, Variety magazine reported that Matt Damon agreed to star as Wilson and James Robinson's Morgan Creek Productions agreed to help finance the film with a budget under $90 million which meant that many of the principal actors, Damon included, would have to waive their usual salaries to keep costs down. Principal photography began on August 18, 2005 with shooting taking place in New York City, Washington D.C., London and the Dominican Republic.

De Niro wasn’t interested in making a spy movie with flashy violence and exciting car chases. “I just like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman's game.”^[2] He and Roth were also interested in showing how absolute power corrupted the leaders of the CIA. Early on, De Niro said in an interview, “they tried to do what they thought was right. And then, as they went on, they became overconfident and started doing things that are not always in our best interests.”^[2] In order to achieve authenticity, he hired ex-CIA operative Milt Bearden (who worked for the agency for 30 years) as the film's technical advisor.

Three-time Academy Award-winning art director Jeannine Oppewall was assigned art director for The Good Shepherd, which would eventually earn Oppewall her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Art Design. It took her a week to organize the number of set locations due to the large amounts of settings in the script, which included Cuba, Léopoldville, London, Guatemala, Moscow, New York and New Haven, Connecticut, among other places. Although the vast majority of the movie was filmed in New York, the only scenes that are actually set in New York take place in a house in Far Rockaway, Queens. As a result, many sets had to be constructed under Oppewall's direction, including a Skull and Bones headquarters and the Berlin set, which was built on the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Oppewall built sets based on Skull and Bones, Central Intelligence Agency and other clandestine organizations after she consulted with a former CIA operative and researched books of interviews with spy agency insiders. Since the lead character originally aspired to be a poet, Oppewall incorporated many visual poetic symbols into the film, including a large number of mirrors to represent the duplicity of the CIA, full rigged ships as symbols of the state and eagle symbols, which were used in ironic situations such as suspect interrogations.^[3]

The music for the film was by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos. They replaced James Horner, who left the project due to creative differences.^[4]

Edward Wilson, the character played by Matt Damon, is based at least in part on James Jesus Angleton, the long-serving director of the CIA's counter-intelligence staff who also fell victim to intense paranoia during his career, and covert operations specialist Richard Bissell.^[2] Bill Sullivan, the character played by Robert De Niro, is based on William Stephenson and William Joseph Donovan. William Hurt's character Phillip Allen is likely based on former CIA Director Allen Dulles, while Lee Pace's character Richard Hayes shares some similarities, including a similar name, to Dulles' eventual successor Richard Helms. High-ranking British operative turned Soviet mole, Arch Cummings, bears some similarities to Kim Philby (who fled to the USSR after being exposed and spent his last years friendless and mired in alcoholism). The character Yuri Modin shares similar characteristics to Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the character of Dr. Ibanez bears some similarities to Jacobo Arbenz.

In May, 2007, CIA's historians publicly released an article referencing the film's depiction of the OSS and CIA, and discussing factual details surrounding the actual persons on whom some of the film's characters were based. The article also addressed inaccurate but enduring beliefs that Yale's famous secret society Skull and Bones was an incubator of the U.S. Intelligence Community.^[5]

Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesci appears in one scene as a Mafia boss ("Joseph Palmi") who, it is implied in the film, is a fictionalized composite of Santo Trafficante Jr. & Sam Giancana (in one scene it is mentioned that Castro has seized "three of [Palmi's] casinos and thrown him out of Cuba." In fact, Castro did nationalize several casinos owned by both Chicago and Florida organized crime interests). The CIA recruited such mafiosi for multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. The story thread, however, is not fully developed in the film.

[edit] Historical accuracy

[edit] Bay of Pigs leak

The film takes many liberties with the historic events it portrays. Notably, the film inaccurately depicts the Bay of Pigs failure as the result of a leak within the agency. In fact, the CIA's own analysis came to the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs Invasion failed because of a combination of incompetent planning and execution, unrealistic expectations, and poor security.

A Crime So Immense, an article by James K. Galbraith, states that a previously redacted version of the Taylor Report on the Bay of Pigs shows the Russians did know the date of the planned invasion:

One of the great travesties of the Cold War surfaced on April 29, 2000 when the Washington Post reported the declassification in full of General Maxwell Taylor's June, 1961 special report on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Partial versions of this document have been available for decades. But only now did its darkest secret spill. Here is what Taylor reported to Kennedy. The Russians knew the date of the invasion (Therefore, Castro also knew.) The CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, knew that the Russians knew (Therefore, they knew the invasion would fail). The leak did not come from the invasion force; it had happened before the Cuban exiles were themselves briefed on the date. Kennedy was not informed. Nor, of course, were the exiles. And knowing all this, Dulles ordered the operation forward.^[6]

[edit] WWII announcement timing

In an early scene, Edward and Laura are shown at an evening dance, which is interrupted by an announcer stating that they have just learnt that Britain and France have declared war on Germany. However, the public announcement of Britain's declaration of war was made by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a radio address to the British nation on 3 September 1939 at 11:15 am, after Germany had failed to end hostilities in Poland by 11:00 am. This public radio address would have taken place at 05.15 am the same day on the US East Coast (since Britain had daylight saving or summer time, while the USA then did not). It is not plausible that some 16 or so hours would elapse before this announcement became public knowledge in the USA.

[edit] Reaction

The Good Shepherd was released on December 22, 2006 in 2,215 theaters grossing $9.9 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $59.9 million in North America and $39.5 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $99.4 million.^[7]

The film received mixed reviews with the review tallying website Rotten Tomatoes reporting that 89 out of the 161 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 56% and a certification of "rotten" (according to the website's criteria). Metacritic reports the film has an aggregate metascore of 61/100 ("Generally favorable reviews"). In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, "The Good Shepherd is an origin story about the C.I.A., and for the filmmakers that story boils down to fathers who fail their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal", but praised De Niro's direction: "Among the film’s most striking visual tropes is the image of Wilson simply going to work in the capital alongside other similarly dressed men, a spectral army clutching briefcases and silently marching to uncertain victory".^[8] Kenneth Turan, in his review for the Los Angeles Times, praised Matt Damon's performance: "Damon, in his second major role of the year (after The Departed) once again demonstrates his ability to convey emotional reserves, to animate a character from the inside out and create a man we can sense has more of an interior life than he is willing to let on".^[9]

Time magazine's Richard Corliss also gave Damon a positive notice in his review: "Damon is terrific in the role--all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them".^[10] In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "Still, no previous American film has ventured into this still largely unknown territory with such authority and emotional detachment. For this reason alone, The Good Shepherd is must-see viewing".^[11] USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "What makes the story work so powerfully is his focus on a multidimensional individual — Wilson — thereby creating a stirring personal tale about the inner workings of the clandestine government agency".^[12] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum of praised De Niro's direction and Damon's performance, noting the latter's maturation as an actor.^[13]

Newsweek magazine's David Ansen wrote, "For the film's mesmerizing first 50 minutes I thought De Niro might pull off the The Godfather of spy movies ... Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson".^[14] However, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine opined, "It's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse".^[15] In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Emerson wrote, "If you think George Tenet's Central Intelligence Agency was a disaster, wait until you see Robert De Niro's torpid, ineffectual movie about the history of the agency".^[16] Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave the film two out of five stars and criticized Damon's performance: "And why is Damon allowed to act in such a callow, boring way? As ever, he looks like he is playing Robin to some imaginary Batman at his side, like Jimmy Stewart and his invisible rabbit. His nasal, unobtrusive voice makes every line sound the same".^[17]

In 2007, the cast of The Good Shepherd won the silver bear of the prestigious Berlin film festival for outstanding artistic contribution. It was the only American entry in 2007 to win a prize at the festival.

[edit] Sequels

De Niro said he would like to make two sequels to "The Good Shepherd", one bringing the action forward from 1961 to 1989, the other following its protagonist, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), up to the present day.

Although he is not working on research for the concluding parts of the hoped-for trilogy, De Niro said being in central Europe offered a good opportunity to begin thinking about the material^{[citation needed]}. “I had not been planning to do research on that while here, but it is a good idea,” he said^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] References to other fictional espionage works

The meeting between Edward and Ulysses' aid, the agent named CARDINAL, references Tom Clancy's novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin wherein a direct mole within the Kremlin serves American interests during the most tense periods of the Cold War.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official site
• Intelligence in Recent Public Media An analysis of The Good Shepherd by CIA analysts
• The Good Shepherd at the Internet Movie Database
• The Good Shepherd at Allmovie
• The Good Shepherd at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Good Shepherd at Metacritic
• The Good Shepherd at Box Office Mojo
• Movie

v • d • e Films directed by Robert De Niro A Bronx Tale (1993) · The Good Shepherd (2006)