By day, Sigourney Weaver is an underpaid researcher at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in London (with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a pair of designer eyeglasses to show for it); by night, an "escort girl" at the famous and infamous Jasmine Agency (and unbeknownst to her, a pawn in a very grand-scale political game); and at all hours she's a proud, confident, decisive, declarative, prototypical woman of the Eighties -- that's of course the Two Thousand Eighties. Her proneness to border at times on the unbearably flaunting and annoying is somewhat mitigated -- as in such cases as Brenda Starr, Reporter, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle -- by her being well across the border into fantasy. There is no one thing in the package that is unbelievable; it's the combination of things, with no spillage or burst seams, that's that. But whatever the plusses and minuses of the character, the movie succeeds wonderfully well in setting up two distinct social circles and in bringing about their plausible intersection. There is almost a sense here of a sort of post-Profumo renovation of the London of Arthur Conan Doyle or of Stevenson's New Arabian Nights -- a secret London under or inside the public one. Almost, that is, but not quite. Rather than drop us into this under- or inner-world through some sort of trapdoor or secret panel, the movie guides us there, together with the heroine, step by chronological step, in such a way as to dispel its mystery as well as to slow the pace. This abecedarian approach, overly concerned to provide motivation and secure sympathy for the main character, gives it the air of one of those TV-movie exposés on the order of Ashley: Portrait of an Oriental Masseuse or Heather: The Making of a Harem Girl. The political intrigue, meanwhile, has to bide its time in the background, filing its fingernails and humming softly to itself, and then all of a sudden come charging to the front, claws flashing. With Michael Caine; directed by Bob Swaim. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd