The 30 Best Films Set Against the Backdrop of the Cold War

While visiting Moscow during the Cold War, a British book publisher, played by Sean Connery, learns about a manuscript that outlines the Soviet Union’s anti-nuclear missile capabilities. He’s recruited by British intelligence and the CIA to investigate its editor, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

In this thriller, Paul Newman plays an American physicist who stuns his family by defecting to East Germany, and when his fiancée (Julie Andrews) follows him, she discovers he’s a double agent who’s trying to uncover Soviet nuclear secrets.

William Hurt plays a Moscow police officer investigating a triple homicide when he discovers a high-level international political conspiracy.  Lee Marvin plays an American who offers leads, though he might be as dangerous as the KGB.

Michael Caine reprises his role as the wisecracking British spy in this film based on a Len Deighton novel. In this film, he’s sent to East Berlin to collect a communist defector, disguising him as a corpse to get him through the Berlin Wall – but the situation is not what it appears to be.

Charlize Theron plays an undercover agent for the British secret service group M16 sent to Berlin during the latter stages of the Cold War to investigate the murder of a colleague and retrieve a list of double agents. As soon as she arrives, it’s become apparent she’s been set up.

The film is based on the book of real-life childhood friends Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee who were arrested for espionage. Boyce, played by Hutton, was a defense industry employee disillusioned with CIA interference in other nations’ internal affairs.  He then sought out Soviet contacts and sold top-secret U.S. satellite technology information to the Soviet Union. His buddy Lee, played by Penn, was a drug dealer who used the opportunity to pass along information to the Soviet Union for financial gain.

This is the film version of the famed John Le Carré novel, a complicated story about betrayal in the ranks of the spied in the United Kingdom. British secret service MI6 sends an agent (Mark Strong) to meet with a Hungarian general who knows the identity of a Soviet spy within the organization. Before he can reveal the mole’s identity, the general is assassinated. Recently retired agent George Smiley, played by Oldman, is called back to find the mole.

Small-time movie producer Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) decides that the darkening mood of dread and fear surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis is the perfect time to release his cheesy sci-fi thriller “Mant” at a movie theater in Key West, Fla., the closest U.S. point to Cuba. The film focuses on a group of teenagers excited about the movie and the fuss surrounding the premiere.

This is a film adaptation of a memoir by game show creator Chuck Barris (“The Dating Game,” “The Gong Show”), who in his other life was allegedly a hitman for the CIA. Sam Rockwell plays Barris, and George Clooney both directed and co-starred in the film as Barris’s “handler.”

Tom Hanks starred as Wilson, a real-life U.S. congressman who, with disheveled CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and socialite Joanne Herring, played by Julia Roberts, helps support the Afghan resistance during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989.

This comedy featured Woody Allen as Fielding Mellish, a nebbish from New York who tries to impress his social-activist girlfriend by joining resistance fighters in the fictional Latin American country of San Marcos. He eventually becomes the leader of the country and is then targeted by American intelligence, which accuses him of attempting to overthrow the U.S. government.

Richmark Widmark starred as the virulently anti-communist captain of the American destroyer USS Bedford. The ship is engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with a Soviet submersible in the North Atlantic Ocean off Greenland violating territorial waters.

The film title refers to the timeframe of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and the movie captures the interplay among the main players in the Kennedy administration as they try to work with the Soviet Union to defuse the crisis, which put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Matthew Broderick played a student who accidentally hacks into a military supercomputer while searching for a video game. He creates a game titled Global Thermonuclear War that activates America’s nuclear arsenal in response to a simulated threat from the Soviet Union. Once he realizes there is a countdown to Armageddon, he enlists the help of his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy) to stop World War III.

Richard Burton embodied British agent Alec Leamas as he takes on one more assignment before he retires in this film based on John le Carré‘s novel of the same name. He poses as a disgraced former MI5 agent in East Germany to get information about colleagues who’ve been captured. When he gets picked up, he discovers a web of intrigue, unlike anything he’s seen in his career.

This film is set in the 1950s, an era when Sen. Joseph McCarthy sought to expose communists in America. This prompted CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) to focus on revealing the lies and character assassination tactics of McCarthy’s Senate investigation. While the CBS news team produces stories challenging the senator’s charges, they face pressure from the network’s sponsors to desist. The movie title is taken from Murrow’s signoff.

Adapted from Tom Clancy’s novel, this film is about a Soviet submarine commander (Sean Connery) who wants to defect to America. The submarine, Red October, is detected by the U.S. military but it is unclear to them what the boat’s intentions are. CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) must determine its aim and avoid a catastrophic confrontation.

In Sean Connery’s second appearance as James Bond, he is sent to Turkey, where he’s tasked with helping a beautiful Soviet consulate clerk (Daniela Bianchi) defect. In the meantime, the criminal organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is trying to kill Bond to avenge the death of Dr. No (the eponymous villain in the first Connery-Bond film).

Michael Caine became a major star in the 1960s, and “The Ipcress File” – based on a novel by Len Deighton – was one of his best movies of the period. Caine plays Harry Palmer, a wry-humored spy who’s investigating the kidnapping and brainwashing of British scientists. Palmer is unlike the era’s quintessential spy James Bond in that he lives modestly, wears glasses, and does his own cooking. A TV series loosely based on the film, came out this year.

This critically acclaimed film is based on the true story of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union. A lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, is assigned to negotiate Power’s release in exchange for a convicted Soviet KGB spy (Mark Rylance).

This film noir about detective Mike Hammer and his girlfriend, who become entangled in a dark plot involving the torture of women and a scientist conducting deadly experiments that might involve nuclear energy was co-written by crime novelist Mickey Spillane. The movie’s climax was one of the most intriguing of the era.

This film is about a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) in New York City who unknowingly snatches a woman’s wallet that contains a message intended for enemy agents. Before long, he is targeted by a communist spy ring, who uses the woman to find him and retrieve the message.

John Frankenheimer made his mark in the 1960s by directing films depicting Cold War tension, and this is one of his best efforts (the screenplay was written by Rod Serling of the “Twilight Zone” fame. An American general, played by Burt Lancaster, led a plot to overthrow a president (Frederic March) who supported a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.

A technological glitch sends American jets on a mission to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow in this film. It follows the jets on their frantic, disturbingly realistic, attempts to recall the aircraft. Henry Fonda starred as the president, pleading with the pilots to call off their mission.

Another Frankenheimer film, “The Manchurian Candidate” played on the fear of communist infiltration of the highest echelons of government. Frank Sinatra starred as a Korean War veteran trying to stop a U.S. serviceman, played by Laurence Harvey, who communists have brainwashed to assassinate a U.S. presidential nominee. This act would lead to a takeover of the American government.

In 1957, at the height of the Cold War, a boy encounters and befriends a giant robot from outer space and tries to keep him away from a U.S. government agent bent on destroying the robot. The animated feature opens with a visual of the Soviet satellite Sputnik orbiting the Earth.

In this film, post-war Vienna is divided into zones supervised by the victorious allies – the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. There is tension between the East and the West in the shadowy rubble of the city as American novelist Holly Martins (Josep Cotten) tries to track down an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Wells), who’s taken advantage of the post-war chaos to sell black-market penicillin.

From Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, we are given a movie about an advertising executive (Cary Grant) who goes on the run because he’s falsely accused of murder and mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies, led by James Mason. Along the way, he falls in love with a woman (Eva Marie Saint) whose loyalties he doubts.

Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman who can no longer ignore the influence organized crime has on the Hoboken docks. The movie launched Brando into cinema stardom. Director Elia Kazan was criticized for naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and tried to equate Brando’s testifying before a committee investigating criminal activity in the motion picture with naming names to HUAC.

This dark comedy about nuclear armageddon featured Peter Sellers playing multiple roles, including a German-accented adviser (rumored to lampoon Henry Kissinger) and the president, also played by Sellers. The film came out before a non-satirical thriller with the same theme, “Fail Safe” (No. 7 on this list), which was released later in 1964.