Real Life Revisited

Ring of Treason is a semi-documentary spy drama so set on realism that it takes one of Britain's most pedestrian episodes of peacetime espionage as a model, apparently to avoid drama, thrills or sex. The movie re-creates events leading to the 1961 conviction of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, born Konon Trofimovich Molody, who was recently swapped back to the Russians in exchange for Greville Wynne. Still in a British prison for their association with Lonsdale are pub-crawling Chief Petty Officer Henry Houghton; his plump, middle-aged sweetheart Elizabeth Gee, who filched diagrams, manuals and Admiralty fleet orders; and a pair of personable American traitors, Peter and Helen Kroger, whose cozy home in a London suburb contained a radio that got its programming directly from Moscow.

Briskly acted and filmed, Treason telescopes the story to concentrate on the shambling, corruptible Houghton. He looses his charm on the navy's Miss Gee, a lonely spinster who sits next to a safe full of top secrets, dreaming about love, Monte Carlo and a yellow two-seater sportscar. Their romance, though, consists mainly of weekends in London, and the extent of their moral debauchery is going to a music hall to applaud the Crazy Gang. The film makers warn at the end that "there may be a spy in this very theater, in the very row where you're sitting." Such drab middle-class doings as this film shows may well prod enemy agents into a more exciting line of work.

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