Scripting the Soviet “Spy of the Century”: The Unproduced Biopic on Kim Philby, 1975–1980

From 1975 to 1980, the British scriptwriter Arthur Hopcraft worked on numerous drafts for a proposed film biopic of H. A. R. (Kim) Philby, the notorious UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who turned out to be a Soviet spy. The film was slated to be made by S. Benjamin Fisz Productions but was never produced. This article examines the five-year development of Philby, a project that, at various stages, saw the involvement of three notable directors (Mike Hodges, Don Sharp and Michael Winner) and two major film stars (Michael Caine and Robert Shaw). Drawing on Hopcraft's personal archive, which includes many script drafts and a wealth of other notes and correspondence, this article shows that the story of the failed production is profoundly revealing of the difficulties in narrativizing such a case for public consumption. Over the years Hopcraft and various interested parties repeatedly struggled with the ‘messiness’ of Philby's life story, the problems of psychologising this elusive subject, and the moral framing of such a controversial figure. The Philby project is also situated alongside and compared with Hopcraft's concurrent and ultimately more successful work adapting John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), a novel more loosely inspired by the Philby affair, into a 1979 BBC television serial that stands as a celebrated artifact of Britain's Cold War culture.