User Reviews

That's what Douglas McClure keeps saying on the phone in this defection drama that is a bit slow in spots but has some interesting characterizations and surprising appearances. He's a Russian agent (without the trace of an accent) who all of a sudden decides to affect to America and bids his girlfriend Meg Foster farewell. The next thing you know, he's in a small town married to Rosemary Forsyth and working as the editor of a newspaper, and finding threats from Russian agents everywhere he turns. The fact that his boss, Darren McGavin, hates him makes his life a bit more challenging, as does McGavin's stealing every moments that he is on screen.

You have to really be interested in this subject matter to be fully engaged in the movie, and while there are some good action sequences, I found the film a bit slow and cumbersome and sometimes not convincingly acted. I was hoping to see more of "Little House on the Prairie'" Katherine MacGregor, but she has a throwaway role as McClure's secretary who I thought might have been an agent with her dark looks but only has to deal with the fact that her car is on fire. At only 75 minutes long, there wasn't really enough detail to have me fully interested, and the McClure/Foster reunion was a letdown. Okay as a movie of the week but not much else.

John Llewelyn Moxey IS the quintessential movie-of-the-week director. Always economical with his dialog and camera work, he knows how to intersperse emotional impact with action and pacing as well as anyone. The Death Of Me Yet is a fascinating Cold-War-Era story.

McClure plays a trained Soviet agent who is sent to the US to become a trusted citizen in a small Midwestern community in a town whose main employer is a military contractor. It is basically the "sleeper cell" concept with which we are all-too-familiar today. He plays his role to the hilt as a small town Editor and devoted husband to Rosemary Forsyth with whom he is deeply in love. The trouble, of course, is that he loves his new life. In his mind, heart, and soul, he has become an American. Enter deliciously menacing KGB agent and former mentor Richard Basehart. Then McClure's life really begins to unravel when a gritty, grizzled, and somewhat sadistic FBI agent named Chalk (think Laird Krieger in "I Wake Up Screaming") gets on his tail and begins to suspect who and what McClure really is.

The biggest flaw in the movie is that McClure has so much better chemistry with vibrant and vulnerable Soviet girlfriend Meg Foster than with frigid Rosemary Forsyth and Richard Basehart is so much more willing (at least seemingly) to work out a satisfactory compromise for McClure to get on with his wife than the grimly determined Chalk that even the most patriotic American must question his choice a bit. And Forsyth is just awful as an actress. That said, it's still a great deal of clever and fast-moving fun as long as you view the shoddy production values in its context as a movie-of-the week.