They'd really have to puill all the stops out to be worse than the Network disc: that may well be the very worst transfer I've ever seen (their DVD was much, much less bad even though that was DNR-a-go-goed into soft focus) - it was so bad I couldn't even finish the disc.
My take on the film:
The Quiller Memorandum was originally intended by the Rank Organisation to launch a series to replace the Harry Palmer films after Harry Saltzman took them to Paramount and subsequently United Artists after both studios dropped out of Saltzman's Battle of Britain. It got off to a good start at the box-office but never caught on outside the big cities, although the BBC did resurrect the character for a short-lived series with Michael Jayston in the 70s. Ironically not only filming but also some locations overlapped with Funeral in Berlin, resulting in at least one bizarre photo-opportunity of the two jaded spies happily swapping notes.
The battleground is political ideologies again, but unlike other sixties spies and despite being set in West Berlin, Quiller isn't concerned with cold war politics or communist spy rings (you don't even see the Berlin Wall) but instead with the far right. Well, unless you saw it in Germany on its original release, that is, where Max Von Sydow's cabal of neo-Nazis became communists in the dubbing process. Its use of locations is exemplary, the Nazi focus on healthy minds and healthy bodies working its way into the choice of settings, from swimming pools to schools, and the influence and flow of history illustrated by the die-hard neo-Nazis hiding in the bombed out ruins of the old Germany while the next generation of fascists work out of gleaming modern buildings that are part of the rebuilt Germany. George Segal's Quiller is even briefed in the Olympic stadium Hitler had built for the 1936 Games by Alec Guinness's ever so slightly camp salami-munching cockney.
Perhaps alone among spy thrillers, this is the one where everyone knows the screenwriter's name but virtually no-one remembers the director's. Harold Pinter's often sadistically playful script is without doubt a cut above, preferring unspoken deceptions and more insidious mind games to action scenes. Indeed, the first interrogation scene between a drugged Segal and a quick-thinking Von Sydow is a particularly smart and convincing bit of wordplay as the one tries to steer the questions away from the subject with thoughts of sex only for the other to use them to lead the cross-examination back to the point, while the rematch at the end of the film sets the spy a far more effective moral conundrum.
Certainly as Michael Anderson's reputation has diminished and Pinter's grown it's become one of the few films where all credit has gone to the screenwriter, but Anderson's direction is surprisingly strong, particularly if you see the film in its original Scope ratio. John Barry's score is quietly impressive too, eschewing the downbeat jazz of The Ipcress File and the boldness of his Bond scores for a haunting loneliness that helps set Quiller apart from his more popular predecessors.