“There’s hardly any electricity to match the unfolding of a clockwork-smooth British thriller and Defense of the Realm is one of the most electrifying.

Terrifying in its political what-ifs, keenly intelligent, played by one of those dream British casts and full of scenes that leave us limp from controlled tension, it’s a beautiful job all round. It’s set in and around London’s “Street of Shame”, the journalists’ only half-joking nickname for its publishing hub, Fleet Street, and director David Drury has the daily buzz, the cross-currents, the in-jokes and the pall of cigarette smoke that permeate a metropolitan daily, down pat.

Bright but dead-ended reporter Nick Mullen (Gabriel Byrne) and his friend and sometime mentor (Denholm Elliott), the paper’s respected senior reporter, become involved at opposite ends of a political uproar. It’s touched off by an anonymous tip suggesting that MP Dennis Markham (Ian Bannen) has close KGB connections, with overtones of a sexual scandal. In spite of the older man’s plea to his editors for caution and more investigation, they, and Mullen, in particular, pursue it avidly, with disastrous personal results for Markham.

It’s a plot as tightly knit as an Aran sweater and about as intricate. A nice thing about Defense of The Realm is its reliance on our intelligence; it not only makes us work alongside its heroes but assumes flatteringly that we’re up to the job. We follow the legwork, the hunches, the tips and just plain gruelling effort that result in Watergate-like exposés or international political bombshells – with the tension cranked to the utmost and danger down every dark hallway…

There are bits of fine-tuning that British audiences might understand almost intuitively, which seep into us only in hindsight. Class distinctions that set a Nick Mullen, light years away from Victor Kingsbrook (Fulton Mackay), his paper’s white-moustachioed owner, and political ones that set the tone of Kingsbrook’s paper. They’re a little something for us to mull over afterward – along with the film’s last, lingering life-and-death question…

Gabriel Byrne … emerges as a cracklingly fine actor and in combination with Greta Scacchi, Markham’s assistant, as first-rate romantic hero, for what romance there is. There cannot be enough of Denholm Elliott’s rueful world-weary intelligence. Scotland’s Billy Patterson can also be seen, prodding his staff onto bigger and more lurid headlines…

Martin Stellman did the brilliantly succinct yet revealing screenplay, the exceptionally rich and evocative photography and production design were by Roger Deakins and Roger Murray-Leech respectively and Robin Douet and Lynda Myles were its producers. And it is part of the film’s stamp of quality that its executive producer was David Puttnam”