Plot
Alex Holbeck (Martin Sheen) is recruited as a CIA agent. He is sent to East Berlin on a mission to steal an Enigma code scrambler. This is part of an attempt to stop the Russian assassination of five Soviet dissidents which is planned for Christmas Day. What Alex doesn't know is that the CIA already has a code scrambler. By stealing the scrambler in Berlin, they are trying to convince the Russians that they don't have it.
On arrival in Berlin, Alex finds that the KGB knows he is there. Alex must use numerous disguises and escape from a number of capture attempts. He seeks shelter with his former lover, Karen (Brigitte Fossey) before moving on as this is too dangerous for her. Karen and a number of Alex's other old friends are taken and assaulted by the police in an attempt to gain information about Alex's whereabouts. As he gets more desperate, Alex enlists Karen's help again: she seduces Dimitri Vasilikov (Sam Neill), the KGB man in charge of the hunt for Alex, in order to obtain information. In the end Dimitri catches Alex and Karen and finds the scrambler hidden in an exhibition artifact. As he is in love with Karen, he lets them go, however, keeping the scrambler which was in fact not needed. On Christmas Day the assassination attempt is successfully thwarted.
Read more about this topic: Enigma (1983 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)