Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Our movie this week is the 1981 British Spy Thriller "Eye of the Needle," based on the 1978 novel by Ken Follett, originally published under the title "Storm Island."

The film was directed by Richard Marquand from a screenplay by Stanley Mann.

"Eye of the Needle" stars Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, Ian Bannen, and Christopher Cazenove with support from Philip Martin Brown, Faith Brook, Barbara Ewing and Bill Nighy.

In the early years of the Second World War, a man called Henry Faber works in a London railway depot where soldiers gather and are sent off to different military encampments on their way to fight in the war.

One evening his landlady, Mrs. Garden, brings him supper in his room only to find Faber at a radio transmitter sending information about British troop movements to Berlin.

When she screams for help, Faber swiftly stabs her with a stiletto, finishes the transmission, and escapes into the night.

Meanwhile, David Rose, an RAF pilot about to leave on assignment and his new bride, Lucy, are in an automobile crash.

Four years later, Faber, a top Nazi spy known as The Needle because of his use of the stiletto as a murder weapon is still undercover in England when he is ordered to investigate the first United States army group base.

The German High Command is attempting to learn where the allies will invade Europe, and Faber is to present photographic evidence from the FUSAG base to Hitler himself to help determine whether the invasion forces will land at Pas de Calais or Normandy.

Faber discovers the military base is a dummy made to look real from the air and takes a series of photographs, definitive proof that the allies will attack at Normandy.

With this information in hand, Faber eludes the agents of MI5 and heads to the Scottish coast where he steals a fishing trawler to rendezvous with a U-boat that will take him to Germany.

But a fierce storm arises to wreck the trawler and Faber, battered and exhausted, crawls ashore on Storm Island.

The only inhabitants on this small, isolated piece of land are a lighthouse keeper, and David and Lucy Rose, the young couple who were in the automobile accident.

David, now left without legs, is a shepherd and deeply embittered.

He, Lucy and their young son Joe lead a lonely life that is suddenly disrupted by the appearance of a bedraggled stranger, Henry Faber, The Needle.

Espionage has been a part of human warfare since ancient times.

The earliest known classified report based on information gained by spying is among the royal documents of Hammurabi who ruled over the old Babylonian empire in the first half of the 18th century before Christ.

But fictional stories about spies are a much more recent phenomenon.

The genre of spy fiction had its real beginnings only around the turn of the 20th century when international alliances and imperial rivalries, as well as stories about real-life espionage, like the Dreyfus Affair in France, created a popular appetite for tales of intrigue and undercover daring do.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal Sherlock Holmes had several adventures involving espionage, including 1917's "His Last Bow" in which the retired detective himself, serves as a double agent in the run-up to the First World War.

During that war, authors wrote many stories about ordinary people who inadvertently became wrapped up in the undercover affairs of state and somehow manage to survive.

Notable among these authors was John Buchan, whose five novels about the amateur Scottish spy Richard Hannay began with 1915's "The 39 Steps," adapted in 1935 into a classic motion picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

During the '30s, the rise of fascism in Europe and the growing likelihood of war brought a new urgency to spy stories with a clear moral contrast between the two sides, at least for readers in the Allied nations.

The events leading to the Second World War, as well as the war itself continue to offer writers opportunities for gripping spy thrillers.

Welsh author Ken Follett had his popular breakthrough with his 1978 novel "Storm Island," later retitled "Eye of the Needle," which became an international bestseller with over 10 million copies sold worldwide.

After the nefarious doings of Henry Faber and the attempts by MI5 to track him down, the last third of Eye of the Needle reduces the scope of the intrigue to a single, small family, David and Lucy Rose and their son Joe, and single isolated locale, Storm Island, with no other inhabitants except a chronically drunk lighthouse keeper with a strategically important shortwave radio.

After Faber kills off the lighthouse keeper and David Rose, Lucy is left alone to stop him.

As Faber says, "The war has come down to the two of us."

[calm music] The Scottish Islands seem to be the British writer's go-to location for stories involving isolation, eccentricity, loneliness, and not coincidentally, frequent indulgence in whiskey with its attendant complications.

Scotland has over 900 offshore islands, of which 89 are permanently inhabited.

There are four main Scottish archipelagos, or groups of islands.

Shetland to the northeast, the farthest northern point of the British Isles, Orkney, to Shetland's southeast, and the inner and outer Hebrides off the northwest coast of Scotland.

The Storm Island scenes for Eye of the Needle were shot over a period of eight weeks on the Isle of Mull in the inner Hebrides.

Despite the impression given by the film, Mull is the second largest island in the Archipelago, after Skye, with a population of just under 3,000 in 2011.

During the Second World War, the entire island was a restricted area with a naval base for escort ships used for anti-submarine warfare.

Mull also features the expansive Benmore Estate, which in its time has seen the likes of such literary visitors as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, and J.M.

Barrie, as well as Queen Victoria.

[calm music] In Eye of the Needle, the information Henry Faber is determined to pass on to German intelligence is photographs proving that the military installation for the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG was in fact a ruse, a false army.

This part of the story is based on historical facts.

The German High Command knew that allied forces were going to invade Europe and that the invasion was most likely to happen in early June.

What they did not know was where the invasion forces would land.

Deception became a key element in the allied effort to keep the invasion location secret.

FUSAG was only one part of an elaborate deception.

In fact, FUSAG did not include many dummy tanks, airplanes, or other vehicles since the Germans were by that stage of the war unable to fly reconnaissance flights over England.

Most of the deception involved dummy buildings and phony landing crafts called Big Bobs, which had a bad habit of being blown over by the wind.

In terms of the plot, which depends on Hitler's insistence that he meet with Henry Faber and see his evidence in person, photographs from FUSAG would reveal any allied plan to invade at Pas de Calais to be the hoax it in fact was.

But then Faber is shipwrecked on Storm Island and the movie takes on a decidedly different turn.

When Eye of the Needle first opened, there was disagreement among critics and audiences about the nature of the relationship between Faber and Lucy Rose.

Was it a romance or not?

Some reviews referred to Faber as lonely, but his dispassionate isolation from others is what allows him to betray and murder them so easily.

Throughout the film, Faber is portrayed as cunning and inherently duplicitous, as befits his role as a master spy, but that undermines the idea his later relationship with Lucy is a romance.

Does Faber have any real feelings for Lucy or is he merely using her as he has used others, to gain her trust and advance his own schemes?

This was an issue Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times addressed in his review of Eye of the Needle at its original release in 1981.

He wrote, "The last third of the movie turns into a bloody melodrama as the needle kills the husband and the lighthouse-keeper and threatens the woman, first in a psychological way and then with violence.

But before the final standoff, he pretends to be merely a lost sailor.

And the woman, frustrated by her husband's drunkenness and refusal to love, becomes attracted to the stranger.

They make love.

She grows fond of him.

Does he grow fond of her?

We can never be sure, but he tells her things he has told no one else."

The movie ends with Lucy regarding a man who is either a treacherous spy or an unloved child.

Take your choice.

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.