Sebastian

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Sebastian

1968

1h 40m

Comedy

Drama

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Tomatometer

Popcornmeter

29%

Tomatometer

7 Reviews

55%

Popcornmeter

50+ Ratings

On his way to an awards ceremony, Mr. Sebastian (Dirk Bogarde) runs into Becky Howard (Susannah York) on the street, and although they get off to a rough start, he ends up offering her a job when she recognizes his name backwards. It turns out he runs the all-female decoding office of British Intelligence, and she is to be a code-breaker. Once she settles into her new job and starts falling for Sebastian, however, a security breach erupts and puts everything into jeopardy.

Pauline Kael

The New Yorker

It’s a trivial little movie, a London-set comedy-thriller about espionage and code-breakers, with not much in the way of comedy and less in the way of thrills. It’s just classy pulp, but the whole thing goes by before one has time to begin to hate it.

Jul 6, 2022

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Roger Ebert

Chicago Sun-Times

What we are stuck with, then, is a movie that moves confidently in three directions, arriving nowhere with a splendid show of style.

Rated: 2.5/4

Jan 4, 2018

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Renata Adler

New York Times

The put-on, of course, consists in never really letting the audience know what level of seriousness the film is at, and the movie itself sometimes seems unsure.

Jan 4, 2018

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TV Guide

Inventive and amusing, but never really rising above the norm for long.

Rated: 2.5/5

Mar 30, 2018

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Tony Mastroianni

Cleveland Press

For a time this looked as though it may become a character study of a man, an examination of an intellectual in a pursuit that a machine might do better. But in that direction it never quite jells -- nor in any other.

Jan 4, 2018

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Penelope Houston

The Spectator

Sebastian is wayward, a bit too consciously out to please, but enjoyable precisely because it never comes too close to defining its own terms.

Apr 7, 2015

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eric b

"Sebastian" is a curious clash of story elements, mixing an unlikely romance with the trendy spy genre. The always compelling Dirk Bogarde is the title character, the enigmatic star of a British agency devoted to Cold War code-breaking. For mysterious reasons, his support staff is entirely composed of attractive, fashionable women. His job interviews dwell on offbeat tests of mental dexterity like "Spell your name backwards" and "How many words can you make out of 'thorough'?" Sebastian meets his match when he hires clever Rebecca (Susannah York). He already has a girlfriend (Janet Munro), a has-been singer, but their relationship is on the wane. Naturally, Sebastian struggles to hide his affair with Rebecca from their co-workers, his boss (an underused John Gielgud) and an intrusive security officer (Nigel Davenport). What's most peculiar is that the decoding aspect never becomes essential to the plot. One would expect some individual document to become a central crisis, but this doesn't happen. Coding issues remain in the background, and no message's content is ever revealed. If the story were about two people who shared a love of crossword puzzles, it wouldn't be much different. The focus turns to the budding relationship between Sebastian and Rebecca, yet Sebastian has such a distant personality (Asperger's Syndrome, anyone?) that his interest in her is barely plausible. His mind never stops gnawing on the permutations of letters and numbers that rule his workday. Pop-culture fans will enjoy the snazzy Jerry Goldsmith score, along with some Morse code-like electronics from Delia Derbyshire (best known for work on the "Doctor Who" television series). There is one stylish nightclub scene, plus the obligatory '60s-era sequence where sound effects and woozy cinematography convey a drugged character's altered perception. And the opening credits are strangely reminiscent of an '80s video game, years in advance. The young Donald Sutherland makes a brief but meaty appearance.

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

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Audience Member

saw this once on TV, and desperately want to see it again.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

01/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Dirk Bogarde and Susanna York head up a tale based around a British codebreaking operation in the late 1960's. Lilli Palmer is a veteran coder and John Gielgud is the Home Secretary. Music by Jerry Goldsmith.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

01/26/23

Full Review

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David Greene

Director

Dirk Bogarde

Sebastian

Susannah York

Rebecca Howard

John Gielgud

Head of Intelligence

Lilli Palmer

Elsa Shahn

Margaret Johnston

Miss Elliott

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Synopsis

On his way to an awards ceremony, Mr. Sebastian (Dirk Bogarde) runs into Becky Howard (Susannah York) on the street, and although they get off to a rough start, he ends up offering her a job when she recognizes his name backwards. It turns out he runs the all-female decoding office of British Intelligence, and she is to be a code-breaker. Once she settles into her new job and starts falling for Sebastian, however, a security breach erupts and puts everything into jeopardy.

Director: David Greene
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Original Language: English
Runtime: 1h 40m