“The Courier” (M) and a half
JUST how much Tom O’Connor’s screenplay for Dominic Cooke’s film depends on two books written by British electrical engineer Greville Wynne, and also how correctly those books tell the story, must be a matter for conjecture at this stage.
“The Courier” tells a story reflecting Wynne’s service as an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky at the height of the Cold War.
Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynne wrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandising books, “The Man From Moscow” (1967) and “The Man From Odessa” (1981). The key word here is “self-aggrandising”.