Blunt the Fourth Man / Guilty Conscience 2001 Horror Movie Review

BLUNT is a season 3 episode of the long-running BBC TV program, “Screen Two,” an anthology series of 90-minute films. GUILTY CONSCIENCE is another made-for-TVer, but an American one.


In the first, Ian Richardson portrays Anthony Blunt. He was arrested in 1951 and charged with being the British contact for a Soviet mole stationed at Her Majesty’s Washington D.C. embassy. Anthony Hopkins is Guy Burgess, a fellow counter intelligence operative who helps their spy in America to safely reach the U.S.S.R.


Hopkins stars in GUILTY CONSCIENCE as a criminal attorney contemplating divorce who’d rather kill his wife than pay alimony. He carefully works out in his mind different murder scenarios and using an imaginary lawyer counterpart calculates how each courtroom trial would play to the residing judge (his father’s portrait) and how they’d conclude. Throughout all these mental gymnastics, the would-be assassin doesn’t know that his wife is considering how to bump HIM off! A delicious screenplay is by the creators of the Peter Falk crime drama series, COLUMBO.



Parenthetical numbers preceding titles are 1 to 10 imdb viewer poll ratings.


(6.7) Guilty Conscience (TV-1985) - Anthony Hopkins/Blythe Danner/Swoosie Kurtz/Donegan Smith


(6.4) “Screen Two”: Blunt (TV-UK-1987) - Ian Richardson/Anthony Hopkins/Rosie Kerslake/Michael Williams