Summaries

Synopsis

In the present (1992), elderly Linda Voss is interviewed by a BBC documentary team about her experiences before and during World War II.

In 1940, Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith), a young woman of Irish/German Hebrew parentage, applies for a job as a secretary with a New York law firm. She always dreamed of visiting Berlin and finding her family members there.Linda is rejected for the job because she did not graduate from a prestigious women's college.Because she can speak German fluently, she becomes assistant/translator to Ed Leland (Michael Douglas), a humorless attorney. Linda gradually comes to suspect that Ed hides dark secrets. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, when America joins the war with the Allies, Ed emerges as a colonel in the OSS. She accompanies him to confidential meetings in New York and Washington D.C., and before long, they become lovers. When he is suddenly posted away, she is left alone and devastated.

Assigned to work in the War Department, Linda hears nothing of Ed until he reappears as suddenly as he left. Reluctant to resume their affair, he does re-employ her. Ed and his colleagues abruptly need to replace a murdered agent in Berlin at very short notice. Despite knowing little about intelligence work - only what she's seen in movies - Linda volunteers and Ed allows himself to be persuaded by her fluent German and passion to contribute to the war effort. Her mission is to bring back data on the V-1 flying bomb.

They travel to Switzerland, where Ed hands her over to master spy Konrad Friedrichs, code-named "Sunflower" (John Gielgud). Despite being appalled at her dialect ("the accent of a Berlin butcher's wife!"), he installs Linda in the basement of his Berlin mansion and introduces her to his niece, Margrete Von Eberstein (Joely Richardson), a beautiful socialite also working as an Allied agent.

Linda assumes the identity of Lina Albrecht and is planted as a cook in the household of a social-climbing Nazi named Horst Drescher. He is throwing an important party, but she arrives too late to prepare the food properly, causing the dinner to be a disaster. Linda is sacked on the spot.

Walking dejectedly on the dark street, alone and after curfew, Linda chances to encounter a guest from the dinner, officer Franze-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson), who is charmed by her and mistakenly assumes she must already have had a security check. Dietrich is a widower and takes Linda/"Lina" on as a nanny to his two children. Between her duties as a servant, she searches Dietrich's house for confidential papers on the V1, which he is also working on. She intends to photograph them but can find nothing.

Unable to report back to Ed, she is taken to Dietrich's house and effectively drops out of sight. Contrary to orders, she also attempts to locate her cousins, believed to be hiding in Berlin. She tracks down her relatives hiding place.

Meanwhile, Ed, sick with worry about Linda since her disappearance from Drescher's party, suddenly chances to see her in a newsreel of Hitler in a parade in Berlin. Ed's agents identify Dietrich as the man standing next to Linda in the film, and Ed heads to Germany to rescue her. Because he does not speak German, he assumes the identity of a wounded high-ranking German officer, who has had his throat injured and cannot speak.

Linda is found and rescued by Ed, who has come to Berlin in the guise of a high-ranking German officer. Linda reveals that she has located her Hebrew cousins, excitedly telling Ed and Margrete how nearby they are. She demands Ed give her another day to visit them and give them hope. The next day, with the children in her care, Linda tracks down her relatives' hiding place in the city, but she finds it empty and ransacked, as they have just been captured.

Back at the house, a bombing raid causes the Dietrich children to reveal a hidden room in the basement. Linda sneaks down there that night and finds and surreptitiously photographs Dietrich's top-secret V-1 rocket blueprints. Dietrich has fallen in love with Linda and invites her to the opera. While there, Linda's cover is blown when Margrete's mother recognizes her, believing Linda to be a friend of her daughter's from college. Dietrich is heartbroken and, once back at his house, Linda sees him loading his gun.

Fearing for her life, Linda flees across the city, still in her ballgown, and finds sanctuary with Margrete. After Margrete suggests Linda take a bath, she uses the pay phone on the street to report in to her superiors, but Linda catches her. Margrete returns to the apartment and shoots Linda. Margrete reveals that she is a double agent, who betrayed the agent Linda replaced, causing his death, and that she gave away the location of Linda's Hebrew cousins to the Gestapo. The two struggle and Linda, although wounded, overpowers Margrete and kills her. Linda hides in the laundry chute, escaping the German forces who raid Margrete's apartment.

Badly wounded, Linda is found by Ed and Friedrichs, who take her to the railway station, and they travel to the Swiss border. Linda is barely alive, and his travel papers are out of date. Ed's bluff fails to sway the border guards, forcing him to shoot his way out. Still carrying Linda, he struggles towards the frontier border. The German sniper guarding the border wounds him twice, but he manages to get himself and Linda onto Swiss soil before collapsing. The sniper is shot by his Swiss counterpart.

An elderly Linda gives a television interview. It is revealed that while Linda and Ed recovered from their injuries in a Swiss hospital, the microfilm of the secret German documents has been retrieved from a hiding place inside Linda's glove - a trick she learned from one of her favorite war movies and the Allies successfully bombed the V1 installation. She waves to Ed, now her husband, and their two sons. Ed joins her on camera.