Charming Cold War caper that knows exactly what it's doing. The plot is kind of Foreign Correspondent-light with shades of North by Northwest—Nobel Prize intrigue, nefarious national plots, some light espionage in a European capital—which makes sense, since Ernest Lehman wrote both this film and the latter of those reference points. Lehman was one of the great studio-era craftsmen, responsible for everything from Sweet Smell of Success to The Sound of Music, and his witty, propulsive script is carrying a lot of weight here. You can feel him reaching for the Hitchcock playbook, particularly in a nudist convention scene that plays like a winking variation on the auction sequence from Northwest.

The problem (if you even want to put it that strongly) is director Mark Robson. Robson came up through Val Lewton's RKO horror unit and had a solid run of prestige pictures—Peyton Place, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness—but he was a craftsman, not a stylist. The pacing is competent, the setpieces functional, but he can't generate the tension or visual wit that Lehman's script is begging for. When the material calls for Hitchcock, it gets efficient professionalism instead.

Still: Paul Newman spends a solid chunk of the runtime wearing the smallest towel imaginable and looking absolutely incredible doing it. Elke Sommer is the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and Edward G. Robinson is clearly having a ball with a fun accent and a double role that lets him stretch to the edges of his register.

Not essential, but genuinely enjoyable.

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