7 Best Spy Movies of the 1970s
Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
Honestly, the 1960s was a better decade for spy movies than the 1970s was. If you look over the whole sub-genre for the latter decade, you don’t find as much as you might expect. Things shifted, as far as thrillers were concerned, and so many of the most intense and exciting movies about high-stakes things in the 1970s were about things other than spies.
Like, you can’t quite call The Day of the Jackal, All the President’s Men, or Marathon Man spy movies, even if they're all tense and paranoia-heavy thrillers that scratch the same itch that a fair few spy movies do. Anyway, maybe slim pickings here (and the James Bond movies from this decade are a bit divisive, too), but here’s a go at assembling some of the best spy movies of the 1970s.
7 'Scorpio' (1973)
Le Samouraï showed that Alain Delon well and truly knew how to play a hitman, and Scorpio has him doing so again, but this one’s more of a spy movie than a crime one. His character is known as Scorpio, and he ends up getting hired by the CIA to take down one of their own agents, who also happens to be someone who mentored Scorpio.
Things get more complicated when his mentor realizes he’s a target, and then some other spies and shady characters get involved, and things are all very messy, since it’s a spy movie and that’s just how they go, it seems. Scorpio is interesting for having a The Leopard reunion of sorts, though, since Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster (who plays the targeted agent in Scorpio) were both in that one, so that’s nice. Very, very different movie to The Leopard tonally, but still.
6 'The Killer Elite' (1975)
Not to be mixed up with 2011’s Killer Elite, The Killer Elite (1975) is a Sam Peckinpah film that doesn’t feel as much like a Sam Peckinpah film as his best-known works. And there’s more to that feeling than just “Oh, Sam Peckinpah made a lot of Westerns, and this definitely isn't a Western,” because there’s a certain goofiness and chaos here that makes The Killer Elite almost like a comedy.
But also, not a comedy like The Ballad of Cable Hogue was, because there was a sense of things being controlled there, and Peckinpah trying to be funny. The Killer Elite is more a mess of espionage, gang warfare, and then some martial arts sequences (plus a few other things), because why not? Go in being aware that coherence is not something you'll find and it’s possible to have perhaps not a killer time, but a pretty novel and interesting one watching The Killer Elite.
5 'ESPY' (1974)
It would be a bit provocative to say that ESPY is better than all the James Bond movies, though if you're talking about the quality of ESPY in relation to the James Bond movies of the 1970s… well, that might be a slightly different story. Speaking of things being different, this is a rather out-there and unusual kind of spy movie, so it’s hard to compare it to James Bond or pretty much anything else, outside some of the aesthetics and a general sense of ESPY – alongside other action-heavy spy movies – wanting to entertain in similar ways.
In this film, there are some spies who have powers that can help them thwart planned assassinations, and they're stretched pretty thin, since lots of high-profile people are being targeted. It’s a sci-fi spy movie, or a spy-fi movie? And there are action/adventure elements throughout it all, too. It’s weird for sure, but quite a lot of fun, even if it’s hard to argue it deserves to be considered an absolute classic as far as Japanese cinema is concerned.
4 'The Eiger Sanction' (1975)
The Eiger Sanction is mostly solid, as far as action/thriller movies go, but has some novelty value for being a Clint Eastwood movie where he gets to sort of be a spy. He’s technically an ex-assassin, but the job he gets roped into doing is, on paper, supposed to be more peaceful and kind of spy-related, yet things progress in a way where he’s pressured to kill again.
The conflict over returning to a life of violence is not, to put it mildly, as compelling as it was in Unforgiven, which Eastwood also starred in and directed 17 years on from The Eiger Sanction. But The Eiger Sanction is neat when approached as an opportunity to see Clint Eastwood more or less stumble into a 007-type movie, and doing it a bit better than some actual 007 movies, even. It does contain some rather impressive action and stunt-heavy sequences, too.
3 'Three Days of the Condor' (1975)
The best paranoia-heavy movie of the 1970s that Robert Redford starred in was the previously mentioned All the President’s Men, but the second was probably Three Days of the Condor, which is more identifiable as a spy movie. Redford does play a spy here, after all, working for the CIA, but he feels increasingly in danger in his position, and feels as though many other people around him are being targeted (and even killed).
Three Days of the Condor is all about not being able to trust anyone, basically. That’s not unique, as far as spy movies go, but it’s hammered home especially hard and frequently here.
It gets heavy-going alongside feeling paranoid, because Three Days of the Condor is all about not being able to trust anyone, basically. That’s not unique, as far as spy movies go, but it’s hammered home especially hard and frequently here, doing a good job at keeping you feeling almost as uneasy as Robert Redford looks throughout the whole thing. It’s a bit of a feel-bad movie, in other words, but feel-bad in a good way, if that’s even possible.
2 'Enter the Dragon' (1973)
Since Enter the Dragon is about a martial artist (Bruce Lee) going undercover to spy on someone hosting a martial arts tournament, it’s going here. It’s so much more than just a spy movie, of course, being more easily definable as a martial arts movie, and being one of the all-time greats as far as that genre goes, of course. It was the last movie Bruce Lee completed before he passed away tragically young, and was the best of that short acting career.
There’s a gonzo mix of genres here, and with the tournament angle, it’s also a bit of a sports film, but Enter the Dragon makes it all work somehow. If you like your spy movies with a ton of action, and are a bit burned out on 007, then Enter the Dragon is well and truly there for you. Bruce Lee’s got your back.
1 'The Conversation' (1974)
Honestly, The Conversation isn't a spy movie in the traditional sense, but it still features surveillance and spying at its center, and is iconic enough that not giving it some kind of appreciation would feel a bit strange. Gene Hackman’s character is not a spy, and is instead a surveillance expert, with the movie involving him becoming obsessed with a couple he’s listening to, and then paranoia ensues when he starts feeling like they're in danger.
If something can be a spy movie because it’s about spying, rather than being about spies, then The Conversation can be included. For a thriller, it’s very subdued, and you could call it slow, but it’s not slow in a boring sort of way, rewarding your patience should you stick with it. Also, it’s noteworthy how it came out the same year as The Godfather Part II, with Francis Ford Coppola somehow managing to direct both (and not long after 1972, either, which was when the also incredible The Godfather came out).
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.