Watching Movies to Study Intrigue

Alexis has been writing a new series about dungeon mastering, one post of which was about how to effectively incorporate intrigue into your game. Alexis has a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of film, and has often suggested ways for DMs to improve their craft by studying movies (such as in this post). After he broached the subject of intrigue, in his Patreon subscriber chatroom I asked what movies a DM should watch to improve his understanding of intrigue. He gave me the following list (alphabetized, sans "a"/"the"):

• Charley Varrick
• The Eiger Sanction
• Eye of the Needle
• Hopscotch
• Lucky Number Slevin
• A Letter to Three Wives
• Man in the White Suit
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• People will Talk
• The Prince and the Showgirl
• The Quiller Memorandum
• Ransom
• The Secret of Santa Vittoria
• Separate Tables
• Seven
• The Stepford Wives (1975)
• The Sting
• Sugarland Express
• They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
• Three Days of the Condor
• Time After Time
• To Catch a Thief

In his words:

The movies are chosen not because they're all spy films, but more because of the manner in which the exposition is given; it's not easy to explain exactly why these films... nor do I think any one film would be of help in and of itself. Developing a sense for intrigue is a slowly acquired skill, gained through understanding what the characters appear to have said but haven't in fact said, or what they appear to have done, which they haven't done. It is a sense of doubting one's eyes and one's ears, and seeing past what appears to be the purpose of the event or, in this case, of the film.

As it happens, I've been wanting to practice writing about movies anyway, to practice articulating why I liked/disliked something. "Watch these movies to refine your sense of how to apply intrigue to D&D" is as good a prompt as any. Of this list, the only ones I'd seen before were Seven, Three Days of the Condor, and Once Upon a Time in the West.

By now I've rewatched Condor, and watched The Quiller Memorandum, Hopscotch, and Lucky Number Slevin for the first time. Here are my thoughts on the first two of those.

The Quiller Memorandum

My first reaction after finishing Quiller was that it moved too slowly, but upon reflection, I can overlook that: it was like a one-act play.

The heart of the movie is in the relationships Quiller has with others, especially Inge (Senta Berger), his love interest, and Pol (Alec Guinness), his superior in Berlin. Pol is gentlemanly enough, but to him Quiller is ultimately a tool or playing piece (implied by, for instance, the scene where Pol uses two muffins to spell out Quiller's role as an expendable information-gatherer, then eats the crumb of muffin which represented Quiller.) Pol isn't just detached from his operatives; the whole craft of spying is a game to him. Throughout the movie, he treats all developments with a bemused air, and the script reinforces his arm's-length view of events: even the climactic capture of the neo-Nazis is only shown to us as one end of a telephone conversation, and Pol seems to care about his victory about as much as he cares about going upstairs for breakfast. He's not sloppy -- we see him insist on procedures like the elaborate cigarette ritual for identifying an agent -- but he's a spymaster more than he is the guy in the field. He gets to be the big-picture guy, and he knows it. The two guys who previously had Quiller's job died, and Quiller is in danger throughout the movie; to my recollection, Pol never is. Small wonder that Quiller is disillusioned with him by the end of the movie.

Quiller's relationship with Inge is even more important. Her deception undermines what little joy Quiller might otherwise have found in his victory. If she can't be trusted, who can be? Is anything that she said to him real? Were her emotions all fake? Who else might be a conspirator? The use of background characters as Nazis later in the movie sets up the message that Inge's deception drives home: nobody can be trusted for sure and there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you want to believe otherwise.

(I want to say something about the cinematography and the effectiveness of the close-ups on Inge and Quiller at various points -- but I don't know how to put it into words.)

On another note, my favorite part, hands down, was the scene where Oktober (Max von Sydow) first interrogates Quiller. That maneuver where Oktober gets behind the captive Quiller and massages his temples has caught fast in my memory (almost as strongly as a gesture from another movie: the sweep of the hand which Charlene (Ashley Judd) uses to warn Chris (Val Kilmer) away from a police ambush in Heat.) I liked the temple massage because it deviates from how one would expect the captive to be treated during interrogation; as a DM, it's useful to me as something an interrogator can do which is unexpected and off-putting, but not violent. I bet it would get a strong emotional reaction from the party, especially if one of their allies did it to a prisoner they had taken.

An open question: was the older teacher in league with Inge and the Nazis? There's that moment at the end where she does the briefest of double takes upon seeing Quiller at the school, and she is the one who introduced Quiller to Inge...

Three Days of the Condor (rewatch)

I'll be honest: part of me spent the whole movie waiting for Joubert's (Max von Sydow) line in the penultimate scene which begins, "It will happen this way." It's the perfect description of an assassination, uttered by a consummate assassin.

What I tried to concentrate on hardest was the change in Turner (Robert Redford.) Turner starts off scared and desperate, but he's inventive and willing to take risks. Though initially the underdog, he goes from being on the back foot to surprising and outwitting his pursuers, first with the kidnapping scheme, then by jacking into the municipal phone lines. I think it's important to notice, however, that his resourcefulness doesn't instantly turn him into an expert field agent, much less a hardened killer. Near the end, we get an excellent demonstration of what Turner is not by contrast with Joubert, who enters onto the scene, kills Atwood, and immediately begins wiping down fingerprints and asking Turner what he touched.

This leaves me wondering how I can arrange the game setting, including friendly NPCs, to encourage players to take (calculated) risks the way Turner does ... and how to make those risks seem both daunting and tempting. What are concrete steps I can take as a designer? If I want enable maneuvers like the phone hacking scene, I can try to:

• keep PC skills / sage abilities in mind as I research my setting's historical backdrop (1650s Earth), trying to map actions taken by historical or fictional people onto the capabilities offered by said skills / abilities
• draft brief vignettes which describe setting chunks from a inhabitant's perspective, and explain / show how someone with sage ability X is able to influence that part of the setting -- both to fire players' imaginations, but also to prepare myself for when they might try to do something similar