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Like a fraudulent painting feigning authenticity, Queen Elizabeth's curator of art in the 1970s wears a mantle of respectability cloaking his role as a traitor in the 1950s. Does the Queen know her learned advisor is a former Soviet spy? That is one of the questions this 1992 film explores as it recounts the outcome of the notorious Burgess-Philby-McLean spy scandal that shocked Great Britain during the Cold War. In perhaps his finest role, James Fox portrays the fourth, unfingered spy in that scandal, Sir Anthony Blunt, a charming, aristocratic art historian, author, and university professor who served as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Fox is exquisitely subtle and shrewd in his role, but no more so than Prunella Scales as the clever queen, whose allusive questions and elusive replies build suspense in this psychological thriller. John Schlesinger skillfully directs the film, using art symbolically as the plot unfolds. A Question of Attribution is based on the heralded play by Alan Bennett, the same writer who scripted the highly successful The Madness of King George.