The Shield and the Sword

The Cold War was a conflict waged not merely on battlefields and in laboratories, but across the cultural frontlines of cinema screens. By the mid-1960s, the West had secured a decisive psychological victory in the spy genre: James Bond’s suave omnipresence, amplified by Hollywood’s industrial might and a cascade of Eurospy imitators, had saturated global consciousness with an intoxicating vision of Western technolo…