Argo

Argo, American political thriller, released in 2012, that was based on events that took place during the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis. It centers on several U.S. embassy workers who escaped the hostage takers, took refuge with Canadian diplomats, and were able to escape the country disguised as a Canadian film crew. The movie, which wove archival footage in with tense interior shots and scenes of a simmering Iran, won critical plaudits and the Academy Award for best picture.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

The movie begins with a brief narration of the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the following Iranian Revolution and opens on the scene of the U.S. embassy in Tehran surrounded by militant protesters. Inside, staffers are frantically shredding and burning documents. In the Office of Visas, the only building in the compound with an exit to the street, the diplomat Bob Anders (played by Tate Donovan) gathers the other employees—Mark Lijek (Christopher Denham) and his wife Cora (Clea DuVall), Joe Stafford (Scoot McNairy) and his wife Kathy (Kerry Bishé), and Lee Schatz (Rory Cochrane)—and they slip out to the street. They are turned away by the British embassy, but the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor (Victor Garber), takes them in. In Washington, D.C., Hamilton Jordan (Kyle Chandler), the president’s chief of staff, is briefed on the situation. The State Department looks for ways to extract the Americans. Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) of the CIA calls in Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), a specialist in creating false identities in support of espionage operations. Mendez shoots down every idea suggested to him for extracting the six houseguests of the Canadian ambassador but later has the idea of disguising them as a Canadian film crew that is in Iran for the purpose of scouting movie locations. Mendez and O’Donnell contact John Chambers (John Goodman), a Hollywood makeup artist who has worked with the CIA previously. Chambers enlists producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), who finds and then options a script for a sci-fi film called Argo and issues news releases about the coming movie. Mendez travels to the Middle East, disguised as a producer for the film, and meets with the six Americans to explain the plan and give them false identities as Canadian filmmakers. Although the Americans are dubious and suspicious, they go along with the plan, including taking a tour of the city led by an Iranian cultural official. Mendez and the Americans surmount several crises that threaten to derail the escape and manage to get onto a Swissair passenger jet and fly to safety.

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Argo drew its inspiration from a 2007 article in Wired magazine written by Joshuah Bearman titled “The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran” and from Tony Mendez’s memoir, The Master of Disguise (1999). While Affleck, who also directed the film, was praised for his evocation of tension and suspense and for having made the movie look as though it had been filmed in the late 1970s, it was also noted that the film disregarded some of the facts of the situation. In particular, Argo drew complaints that it had minimized the considerable contributions of the Canadian government toward the safe extraction of the six Americans. Also, the film included many near-discoveries of the group that did not actually occur. Affleck won a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA award for his direction of the movie. The events of the film had been dramatized earlier in a 1981 television movie, Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper, and were also described in a book by historian Robert Wright, Our Man in Tehran (2010).

Production notes and credits

• Studios: Warner Brothers, GK Films, and Smokehouse Pictures
• Director: Ben Affleck
• Writer: Chris Terrio (screenplay)
• Music: Alexandre Desplat

Cast

• Ben Affleck (Tony Mendez)
• Bryan Cranston (Jack O’Donnell)
• John Goodman (John Chambers)
• Alan Arkin (Lester Siegel)
• Victor Garber (Ken Taylor)
• Tate Donovan (Bob Anders)
• Christopher Denham (Mark Lijek)
• Clea DuVall (Cora Lijek)
• Scoot McNairy (Joe Stafford)
• Kerry Bishé (Kathy Stafford)
• Rory Cochrane (Lee Schatz)
• Kyle Chandler (Hamilton Jordan)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Supporting actor (Alan Arkin)
• Editing*
• Sound editing
• Sound mixing
• Writing*