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Excellent adaptation.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A very dull film is the only way of describing this tale of spies and defectors, plastic surgery and double dealing, during the Cold War. Michael Caine plays the rejuvenated spy who returns to his homeland, and his former friend and sparring partner, head of M15 (a truly appalling Laurence Olivier), at the same time reviving his relationship with his pouting daughter Penny (Susan George) who is having a fling with a secret service man (Robert Powell), who is surviving attempts to kill him by ... well, who knows? With fruity support from Charles Gray and Michael Medwin and an awful script delivered in poor accents (Caine's Russian has to be heard to be believed) 'The Jigsaw Man' becomes a bit of a joke. It is watchable, but is really a load of old rubbish dressed up in London locations and with some semblance of a plot.

Sir Philip Kimberley is a former M16 intelligent general who defected to the Russians in the 70s, returns back to his home country after faking his death. He receives plastic surgery on his face, so he could go into England to pick up very important documents that he has hidden which has KGB agents working in England. Knowing that the British thinks his dead, he escapes the KGB men and defects back to the British as a Russian spy. He goes on to basically play each other off, in the hope he can pick up a large amount of doe and go on to live a new life, along with his daughter."The Jigsaw Man" is pretty much a fundamental Cold War thriller, which feels clammy and looks like a cheap b-grade spy film. The routine material (taken off Dorothea Bennett's novel) wants to be crafty with many plot tricks involving double crossings, disguises, ever-changing accents and secret documents. But with these aspects, there's just too much restraint and haggard developments in what is mainly a story and dialogue driven outing. You'll need these elements to be strong and convincing, but a stated script completely drags and spits out some bawdy lines. The serious nature of it, can come across quite laughable and ludicrous. While the chunky plot offers a labyrinth of turns, it can be meandering and vapid in many shady situations. These twisty developments running through the story are well organised, but never in a astute manner. Thrills are minimal, but the elaborately taut layout breaks out for an action flourish towards the latter end. Even then, the minor pockets of get-up-and-go just can't break the slumber for too long. Terence Young's pedestrian direction seems to go missing in very long spells, but Freddie Francis' polished photography and John Cameron's steamily leeching music score doesn't follow the same fate. The cast is an excellent one. Michael Caine is decent enough, even though it's not quite an inspired performance and provides nothing more then a sour-face. Laurence Olivier provides class, but again he's left with not too much on offer. One very underrated Robert Powell gives a reliably understated turn and Susan George is sparklingly potent in her supporting role.Incredibly patchy and at times hollow, but still a sturdy espionage thriller. The main problem is that it lingers about in too many chewy sequences then really getting on with it.

I saw this movie with my girlfriend, now wife, in 1984. Being the only two people in the theater on the second day of the movie should have given us a clue but that fact only really made sense when we left the theater 45 minutes later, well before the end. Expecting a decent thriller, Michael Caine worthy, we couldn't grasp the fact that this movie made it into the cinema in the first place! Of course I was 20 year younger then and i have seen some very, very bad movies since but none of them made the impression "The Jigsaw Man" did! Since that day my wife and I qualify bad, boring movies as "Even The Jigsaw Man was better". This movie has played a major part in our movie-viewing life for the last 20 years as THE "Bad Movie Benchmark".

I had seen a documentary about espionage a couple of weeks before seeing this film on TV by chance and i found it simply amusing. The parallels between the film character Philip Kimberly and Kim Philby of real life are too many for this to be just a coincidence (not to mention the name of the film character which seems itself to be some anagram of Kim Philby).All in all this is a nice film if you like espionage with a little comedy on the side. As for the comment of the other reviewer about the film being hard to follow: i didn't think it was THAT hard to follow. Besides, this being an espionage movie, if it wasn't a teensy bit hard to follow what would be the fun in it?