Words and Movies Podcast

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) – Review

Clockwise from left: Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Control (John Hurt), George Smiley (Gary Oldman), and Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds).

In Three Days of the Condor, John Houseman and Cliff Robertson, two high-ranking members of the CIA, are briefly reminiscing about how they entered the intelligence field in the first place, with Houseman (who in the film is British) talking about how he started out a decade after World War I, or as he refers to it, “The Great War”. When Robertson asks if he misses the action from when he was younger, Houseman responds, “I miss that kind of clarity”. Most people tend to look back with nostalgia on the past in general, and today, when it comes to this age of uncertainty we all live under due to the War on Terror waged both here (with all of the terror threats, however real or imagined they are) and abroad, there has been a tendency to look back at what was thought of as the “clarity” of the Cold War, when at least, so the thinking goes, we knew who the enemy was. And the ever-looming threat of the Bomb, while keeping those in charge as well as the populace they governed in a state of alert, paradoxically created a sense of security in knowing as long as no one was going to press the button, things wouldn’t get too out of hand. Even forgetting, for the moment, the terror movement as we know it actually started in the 60’s and 70’s (under the flag of revolutionaries), we should remember the time of the Cold War wasn’t a time of “clarity”, but was just as murky as it is today. It was a world where you never really knew who to trust, and was a world of betrayal. Few people captured this Cold War world as well as John le Carre, particularly in his novels involving George Smiley, the antithesis of James Bond; or, as le Carre put it, one of the meek who do not inherit the earth. Wearing ill-fitting clothes, glasses that he constantly needs to polish, and moving at a slow gait due to his weight, Smiley might seem more fit to be a schoolmaster or an accountant rather than a spy (Smiley describes himself in The Secret Pilgrim – the last le Carre novel to feature Smiley – as “a fat man caught between the pudding and the port). But he actually uses this to his advantage, especially the way he’s able to question people and harp on the details most would forget. This would seem to make him an unlikely movie hero, but in this new adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carre’s most celebrated Smiley novel, director Tomas Alfredson and star Gary Oldman do justice to the character and the story.

As with the 1979 miniseries (more on that below), and unlike the novel, we start with a brief prologue. Control (John Hurt), the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (referred to here, as in the novel and miniseries, as “The Circus”, as it’s headquartered at Cambridge Circus), is certain there’s a mole, or double agent, high up in British Intelligence. And he asks Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), a “scalphunter” (jargon for those who did the dirty deeds in espionage), to go to Budapest to meet with a general who can give Prideaux the name of the mole. Unfortunately, Prideaux finds out it’s a trap, and he’s shot and presumed dead. This forces Control’s ouster (he dies soon after), as well as the ouster of his deputy, Smiley (Oldman). Some time later, however, Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), from the Ministry, comes to Smiley, confirming he also has heard there’s a mole inside the Circus (both this and the fact Control was investigating on his own comes as a complete surprise to Smiley), and since Smiley is out of it and therefore under the radar, he’s in a perfect position to investigate.

The title of the movie (and book) comes from the old nursery rhyme “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief”. Control assigns parts of the rhyme as code names for the people he suspects. Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who wants Control’s job, is Tinker, Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), who runs the London division, is Tailor, Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), Haydon’s second-in-command, is Soldier, and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), who runs the “lamplighters” (security division), is Poor Man (Control skips over Sailor because it’s too similar to Tailor, and Rich Man for obvious reasons; Smiley is known as Beggar Man). Smiley tries to retrace Control’s steps, as well as interview Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), a scalphunter who basically got the ball rolling – he had fallen in love with Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova), a spy posing as a businessman’s wife, and before she was captured by the KGB, she told Tarr there was a mole in the Circus; he was the one who called Lacon – and Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke), the former researcher at the Circus until she was retired along with Smiley and Control. She had pointed out a Russian named Polyakov (Konstantin Khabenskiy) who might have been the mole’s handler, but no one wanted to hear it. With the help of Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), his protege, and Lacon to an extent, Smiley tries to track the mole, as well as confront two of the ghosts in his past; Ann, his unfaithful wife, and Karla, the Soviet spy whom Smiley tried (and failed) to recruit in his younger days, and whom he suspects is behind the mole.

Alfredson, Oldman, and co-writers Bridget O’Connor (who died after filming had wrapped) and Peter Straughan are confronting ghosts of their own with this movie. For one, the miniseries is not only well-acclaimed, it also took five-and-a-half hours to tell its story (the British DVD runs longer), while this movie clocks in at 127 minutes, so there’s quite a bit that had to be cut. For another, while there have been a number of actors to play the role of George Smiley – among them James Mason (though the character had a different name) in A Deadly Affair, Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Call for the Dead, Denholm Elliot in the made-for-TV version of A Murder of Quality, and Rupert Davies in The Spy who Came In from the Cold – none are as memorable as Alec Guinness, who played the role in both the miniseries of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People (the novel The Honourable Schoolboy actually came out between those novels, but wasn’t filmed due to budget constraints). Still, I think everyone involved has done a good job of making the movie stand on its own. For starters, Alfredson and production designer Maria Djurkovic make the building where the Circus is located an integral part of the story, with its retro look, the dumbwaiter that passes files from floor to floor, and the rooms that look as if they’re under the magnifying glass the entire time. Also, Alfredson and the screenwriters make some smart decisions in cutting the story down; in the movie, you never see Ann Smiley or Karla except in brief glimpses, which again adds to the idea of Smiley chasing their ghosts. The film also adds a Christmas party scene not in the novel or miniseries, but conveys, in flashback scenes, the relationship between several characters (as well as some dark humor; the characters sing along to a Soviet anthem at one point), as well as hints of things to come. Alfredson and the writers also bring out the sexual undercurrents only hinted at in the novel and miniseries; making the relationship between Ricki and Irina more passionate (in the novel and miniseries, he also has a wife and daughter, but that’s dropped here), having Connie tell George she’s feeling “under-f***ed” (le Carre allegedly heard W.H. Auden tell him this in real life), making Guillam’s womanizing (more spelled out in the novel than in the miniseries) a cover for something else, and, of course, the relationship between Haydon and Prideaux. All of this helps add to the layers of deception going on.

Most importantly, however, Alfredson, O’Connor and Straughan, even in having to cut things down, preserve the elliptical nature of le Carre’s storytelling, making it even more so. This has frustrated many viewers (film professor and blogger David Bordwell, in his excellent essay on the film, starts out by talking about the man behind him in the theater who didn’t “get” the movie) and even some critics. First of all, I do believe as long as you keep in mind the spine of the film – there’s a mole in the Secret Service, and Smiley is being brought out of retirement to stop him – it shouldn’t be too hard to follow. More to the point, though, this elliptical style is a perfect illustration of just how murky the Cold War was – how there were, again, layers of deception before you could finally get to the truth, how you never really knew who your friends or enemies were, and how you kept secrets even from your friends if it served your purpose (as Smiley does to Tarr in a crucial scene). All of that is what spying is about, not about big operations that conclude with gun battles, and much as I’ve enjoyed movies like the Bourne series that are about operations (though those movies are more grave and less morally certain than, say, the James Bond movies), le Carre’s novels and this movie serve as a bracing alternative to that. And while this is made more explicit in the novel (it was inspired by Kim Philby, perhaps the biggest traitor the British SIS ever had, and whom le Carre resented because they came from the same background and because le Carre was one of the people Philby betrayed), we see how spying in Britain, and even America, is often a game for the privileged class that ends up wreaking havoc for everyone else.

Smiley and Guillam with Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham).

One disadvantage the movie has in relation to the miniseries, of course, is the miniseries allowed the actors time to develop the characters, whereas the actors in the movie have to compete with the memories of people who have read the book and/or seen the miniseries and paint the characters in quick brush strokes for those who haven’t done either. Another reason why the movie works so well is because of how well the actors are able to do this. Hurt is perfect as Control, a man being eaten away not only by the toll his job has taken on him, but also the desire to stop the forces trying to put him out to pasture. Strong, who usually plays bad guys, is excellent going against type here, and while he doesn’t have as much to work with as Ian Bannen did in his excellent performance in the miniseries, he’s able to distill both the character’s gentleness in dealing with Bill Roach (William Haddock), the outcast boy at the boarding school Prideaux ends up teaching at and with whom he bonds, and yet the steeliness that remains in him. Jones doesn’t have the same privileged nature Michael Aldridge brought to Alleline, but he goes the other way, playing someone who grabs at the inside because of how long he’s been forced to watch from the outside. Conversely, Hinds suggests more of being to the manor born than the rumpled nature Terrence Rigby brought to the working-class Roy Bland, but Hinds is able to play the character’s resentment all the same. Speaking of resentment, Dencik is less bitter and brittle than Bernard Hepton was as Esterhase, but is able to play up Esterhase’s outsider feeling, which fuels his bitterness. Hardy captures Tarr’s dangerous and romantic nature, but he’s also more mournful than Hywel Bennett was in the miniseries, which works here. Next to Oldman, whom I’ll get to in a minute, Firth has the toughest job here – next to Guinness, Ian Richardson gave the most indelible performance in the original – but if he doesn’t quite measure up, Firth does get Haydon’s cutting wit as well as his reserves of resentment and regret. And even if his character didn’t turn out to be as important here as he was in the miniseries, Cumberbatch feels just right as Guillam, someone completely professional but with his own dark currents underneath.

John le Carre (right) in a cameo at the Christmas party.

But it all turns on Oldman, and he delivers in spades. In the past, Oldman has been known for his over-the-top performances in films like True Romance, Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, and I’ve enjoyed many of those immensely. And even though he’s mostly tried as of late to play more characters who are essentially good if somewhat troubled, as with the Harry Potter movies and the recent Batman movies, he brings that same intensity, which also works. His Smiley is more of an active character on the face of it than Guinness’ was (we see him go swimming, for example, and taking walks), but Oldman brings the same watchfulness, patience and stillness Guinness did in his performance, and is even subtle in bringing out Smiley’s vulnerability. Much has been made of the scene where Guillam, Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack), another retired Secret Service agent who now works as a beekeeper, and Smiley are in a car and a bee starts buzzing around, and while Guillam tries to swat it and Mendel tries to catch it, Smiley simply lets it go. It’s a great scene, but even better, for me, is the scene where Smiley is telling Guillam about interrogating Karla, but for one second, you don’t know if he’s talking about Karla or Ann, two ghosts he’s forever chasing. Oldman plays that perfectly, without pathos. And he uses Smiley’s glasses (a key to the character) as a way of showing both Smiley’s gently probing nature and a shield he puts around himself (we can barely see his eyes at times). In short, even if you’re a fan of the original miniseries and novel, as I am, this movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy stands brilliantly on its own.

Reel 74: The Wages of Greed

Sure, Gordon Gekko told us all that greed, for lack of a better term, is good. And that film sometimes takes the blame for a bunch of unfortunate things that took place in the 1990s.

But there are films out there which note that there’s a darker side to greed (and, to be fair, Wall Street also carries that message; it’s just that people kind of overlooked that part). And in this episode, we look at a pair of films which are years apart from a production standpoint, but whose characters are more or less contemporaneous.

We start with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston and directed by Walter Huston. Anjelica Huston isn’t in this one because she wasn’t born until 1951, I guess. The trio star as three down-and-out Americans who pursue gold in a remote mine in which others have given up hope. They face all kinds of hardships moving to and from the mine, and there are plenty of adventures in between.

From there we go to another film set at about the same time, but on this side of the US/Mexico border, in the American southwest. There Will Be Blood (2007), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a man who is determined to amass as much as he can, but it’s far too late when he realizes the price he pays for his success.

Both of these films also have the distinction of being source material for memes and pop culture gags. With Sierra Madre, of course, it’s assorted variations on whether or not any stinkin’ badges are necessary, and in Blood it’s the phrase “I drink your milkshake.” In both cases I’d be willing to bet all the money in my pockets (nearly 80 CENTS, friend) that most people don’t know the source material for either of them.

Finally, before I set you free to listen to the episode (because of course you’ve been riveted to this poetry I’ve been cranking out so far), I offer you this bit of music that we talked about during Part 2:

Yes, I will expect you to send me Thank You notes for bringing this music into your life.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

Next time, we stick with the Old West with a pair of films that use that genre as an allegory for anti-Capitalist messages. (What?) Don’t worry; it’ll make a lot of sense before we’re through. First we’ll see McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), followed by The Claim (2000). Join us, won’t you?

Reel 73: More John LeCarré

With this episode we conclude our mini-series on spy films, with a second set of films based on the novels of John LeCarré.

We start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a 2011 film directed by Tomas Alfredson and starring more high-power talent than you can shake a stick at. They spent so much money on big-name actors that they couldn’t afford punctuation for the title. (Ha! I’m pretty sure Sean hates jokes like that.) This film, set in 1973, is a Cold War thriller involving a mole near the top of British Intelligence. It’s one of those wheels-within-wheels kinds of tales that will pull you in, maybe confuse you for a while, but it all pulls together in the end.

From there we move beyond the Cold War for A Most Wanted Man, directed by Anton Corbijn and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in his last starring role (he would appear in the last two Hunger Games films, but we’d argue that those aren’t “starring” roles for him). Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, the head of a covert German team that’s hoping to root out Islamic terrorists. Bachmann finds himself at odds with both German and American officials regarding their ultimate goal, which leads to an ending you may not expect. Again, lots of pieces are in motion, but it’s an intriguing tale that will have you wondering who’s on what side.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

Next time around we take a look at the wages of greed. We start off with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and then move on to a film made much later but whose timeline is nearly contemporary to the first one, There Will Be Blood. Join us, won’t you?

The Russia House (1990) – Review

Bartholomew Scott “Barley” Blair (Sean Connery).

It’s somewhat ironic James Bond, for a long time, was considered the symbol of spies and espionage during the Cold War when Bond himself, for all intents and purposes, was never strictly a Cold War warrior. True, he dealt with the Soviets, or Soviet-type agencies, in a few novels and movies (From Russia with Love), and even teamed up with a Russian agent (in the film of The Spy who Loved Me, which has nothing to do with the Ian Fleming novel of the same name). But most often, Bond found himself battling your standard villains with delusions of grandeur, whether acting by themselves (Diamonds are Forever) or within an organization (Thunderball), and while Bond was acting for Queen and Country – and for the women he could get as a side benefit – he wasn’t explicitly acting against the Soviets. Still, it’s also kind of ironic when the Cold War began to unravel in 1989-90 (before finally coming to an end in 1991), and Russia was no longer considered the Great Enemy, the two major 1990 films that both considered the Cold War, and were therefore caught in a crossfire of their own, starred Sean Connery, who became famous thanks to playing James Bond in seven films. In the first of the two films, The Hunt for Red October – adapted from the best-selling novel by Tom Clancy – Connery played a Russian submarine commander who planned to defect to the U.S. The movie was sold as a period piece (taking place in 1984), garnered decent reviews and became a box office hit. The second of the films, The Russia House, despite also being based on a best-selling novel – by, of course, John le Carre – and having the star power of Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, received mixed reviews and was a failure at the box office. However, I think it’s one of the best of the le Carre adaptations, and time seems to have been kind to it for others as well.

Barley promises Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) to act like a decent human being if Dante ever acts like a hero.

Instead of the tough, sophisticated, glamorous Bond, Connery’s character here is the boozy, disheveled and poetic Bartholomew Scott Blair, nicknamed Barley, and it’s fun to imagine Connery took the role because it’s so far apart from the sensibilities of Bond. The owner and head of a small publishing house called Abercrombie & Blair, Barley loves nothing more than to talk, drink, and play his saxophone (a soprano sax). Now that it’s the age of glasnost, Barley is able to make trips to Russia, a country he loves despite its problems, and talk with like-minded people at book fairs and parties. At one particular party, he’s on a roll with his rhetoric, praising the new openness of the world in general and Russia in particular, and declares that everyone needs to betray their own country to better the world. He also adds, “You have to think like a hero merely to behave like a decent human being.” This catches the ear of a man who calls himself Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) – Goethe in the novel – who catches up with Barley outside the party at a graveyard, and makes Barley promise that if he, Dante, ever acts like a hero, then Barley will act like a decent human being. Barley promises, but then forgets all about it.

Dante, however, does not, and his reminder shows up at a book fair in Russia in the form of Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer), a protege of Dante’s. She comes looking for Barley, but finds Niki Landau (Nicholas Woodeson), who works for another publishing house, instead. She pleads with him to give Barley a package with a book from Dante (she doesn’t say it’s from him) that will advance the cause of peace. Intrigued in spite of himself, Landau takes the package. When he sees it’s actually three books and a letter (addressed to Barley), and the books contain engineering terms about missiles, rockets and the like, he turns them over to the British Embassy. Eventually, they get to British Intelligence and the Circus, specifically Ned (James Fox), Clive (Michael Kitchen) and Walter (Ken Russell), and they are all stunned, because what Dante is saying is the Soviet nuclear, missile and defense systems are all in terrible shape, and nowhere near the capacity they tell the public. Is this for real, or is this merely a ruse by the Soviets? First order of business, however, is to find Barley.

Ned (James Fox) trains Barley in the art of being in the field.

Turns out Barley’s at a house of his in Lisbon, though when an embassy official (Ian McNeice) finds him, he’s in a bar/cafe. Even he’s whisked away to meet Ned and company and they present him with the letter (which begins, “My beloved Barley” and ends, “Your loving Katya”), he has no idea what’s going on. Barley truthfully says he doesn’t know Katya (“Never screwed one, never flirted with one, never proposed to one, never even married one”), but after some prodding, he does eventually remember Dante and the conversation they had. Given that, and given both the Circus and their American Cousins – in the form of Russell (Roy Scheider), a CIA director, Quinn (J.T. Walsh), a general, and Brady (John Mahoney), a government official – want to know if Dante’s for real or not, Barley reluctantly agrees to go to Moscow to meet up with Katya and try to arrange another meeting with Dante. Once there, he starts to fall in love with Katya, which of course brings on complications.

Brady (John Mahoney) tells Russell (Roy Scheider), “It’s come to Jesus time for both sides.”

Given the plot, even though it’s taking place during glasnost and perestroika, when things are supposedly more open (Katya tells Barley dryly that the one freedom she’s noticed is she now has the right to complain about long lines without fear of retribution), you might expect this to be as dark and unsparing as le Carre’s other work. Instead, le Carre’s novel is surprisingly lighter in tone, even humorous, though it never downplays the seriousness of its subject. And while director Fred Schepisi and writer Tom Stoppard do compress the novel somewhat – they get rid of the character of Harry Palfrey, a background character who narrates the novel and who turns up in le Carre’s later novel The Night Manager, and consolidate some events while shifting perspective to other characters – they not only remain faithful to the plot for the most part (except for having a more hopeful ending than the more ambiguous novel), they also remain faithful to that tone.

Director Fred Schepisi with Pfeiffer and Connery.

Part of that involves how they play with the narrative structure. Schepisi, of course, would play around with narrative in subsequent films such as Six Degrees of Separation, Last Orders and his made-for-HBO miniseries Empire Falls, and he does so here, though not as much. As we see Katya make her approach to Niki in the beginning, we hear Ned, Clive and Walter grilling Barley about her. Then, near the end, as Ned reads a letter, we see some of the same scenes we had been shown earlier, except this time, we learn what was really going on. The jazz-tinged score by Jerry Goldsmith, with Branford Marsalis dubbing Connery on saxophone, also lends the movie its lightness of spirit, though it also keeps a melancholy tone underneath. There’s also the fact this was only the second American-financed film to be filmed in Russia – the first was the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Red Heat, but the bulk of that film took place in the U.S. – and Schepisi and cinematographer Ian Baker (who has shot all of Schepisi’s films except for Last Orders) certainly show off quite a bit of Russia. As a matter of fact, when I first saw the film, I thought Schepisi was so besotted by the scenery and the chance to shoot so extensively in Russia that he would occasionally lapse by letting the scenery overwhelm the story. Upon subsequent viewings, however, I realized Schepisi, like le Carre, wanted to show you what looked like the true openness of the Soviet Union, and how that still was a disguise in some ways.

Barley and Katya become attracted to one another.

One of the criticisms this received, from Roger Ebert among others, is how the story of Barley and Katya was too often interrupted by men in rooms waiting for something to happen. But those scenes have more of a purpose than you might think. They emphasize the disconnect between the professionals like Russell and Ned (who asks Brady at one point, referring to Dante, “Do you remember straight?”) and Barley and Katya, who, as with many le Carre lead characters, are merely pawns in the Great Game of spying. Stoppard also includes these scenes to flesh out the American characters (who only appear in one part of the novel), so they’re not just a device for le Carre to criticize America for wanting the Soviet Union to remain a boogeyman to justify their arms race (though Stoppard doesn’t soft-pedal that view either). And the fluid camerawork by Baker and the fluid editing by Peter Honess (this was the second of four films he did for Schepisi; Beth Jochem Besterveld also did uncredited editing work) keep the scenes from bogging down the movie. More importantly, though, these scenes with men in rooms waiting bring up one of the main themes le Carre has used not only in this novel, but in past novels; spying is waiting. It isn’t filled with action and derring-do, but waiting for results to come in, or information that can later be used towards producing results.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of fun to imagine Connery playing the part as a way of poking slight fun of his Bond image (when Ned and the others are showing him tradecraft, Barley says, “This is fun. Is that why you keep it secret?”), as the boozy, opinionated, somewhat disheveled Barley looks more like a professor (or a writer) than a sophisticated spy. But Connery doesn’t play the part as a parody, but keeps it real. He’s able to subtly play the decisions his character makes near the end of the film, as well as the openly emotional scenes when he declares himself to Katya. One might balk at the thought of Pfeiffer playing a Russian, but not only does she do the accent flawlessly (as well as the dialect; there’s an emphasis in the novel and movie on how Katya uses the word “convenient” in a way that actually means “proper”), she also looks as Niki describes her in the novel (“she had that rare quality…The Class That Only Nature Can Bestow”), as well as the spirit inside that Barley also falls in love with. And she and Connery have the chemistry that’s crucial to the movie working as a love story in addition to it being a spy story.

Fox, of course, has spent most of his career playing upper-crust characters of all kinds, from diplomats (The Mighty Quinn) to royalty (Patriot Games) to snooty businessmen (Absolute Beginners) and even other spies (the made-for-HBO Doomsday Gun). Ned is the type of role he could have done in his sleep, but Fox invests him with both intelligence and humanity, so we believe Ned is the only one who knows things aren’t as they seem near the end. Russell is caught between his blunt manner (after he chews out Ned in colorful terms, Ned notes dryly, “Russell’s metaphors are becoming rather scatological”) and his genuine wish for glasnost, and Scheider is able to play both sides of him convincingly. I was slightly disappointed at the time, and still am to some degree, that Mahoney didn’t have more to do; in the novel, Brady has quite the conversational duel with Barley, and all you get in the movie is him asking Barley about playing jazz, and chess, with Ray Noble. Still, Mahoney does give Brady the requisite gravitas. And Walsh and Kitchen are convincing enough in their roles, while Brandauer has the intelligence and fatalism of Dante down cold. It’s Ken Russell who’s the big surprise. Though he’d acted in small parts in his own films, this was the first time he’d acted in someone else’s film, and given the over-the-top nature of the films he’s directed (with sharply divided opinions on the quality of those films), you might think he’d try to hijack the movie. But his campy yet caustic take on Walter is perfect for the film, and he gives the film a lift of energy whenever he’s on screen. It’s to Schepisi’s credit that the movie doesn’t flag when Walter disappears from the movie.

One theme that has run through most of le Carre’s work, and which I’ve tried to call attention to in each of these reviews, is how the spy world, and the politics of the real world, are much different than the more escapist films and novels would have you believe. The fact The Russia House is able to hold onto that theme while also being lighter in tone (and more romantic at the end, unlike the more open-ended conclusion of the novel) is a credit to le Carre, as well as Schepisi, Stoppard, and the others who worked on the film. And that’s why this ranks as one of my favorite le Carre adaptations.

The Spy who Came In from the Cold (1965) – Review

Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), center, waits for his agent to cross into West Berlin.

Of all of the symbols of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was probably the most visible. Erected in August of 1961 to separate East Berlin (the Soviet side) from West Berlin (the U.S., British and French side), it ostensibly was supposed to keep so-called “fascist” elements out of East Berlin (and, by extension, East Germany and the Soviet bloc), but in reality was built to stem the tide of those defecting to the West. Until it finally came down in 1990 when the Soviet bloc became free and East and West Germany reunited, the Berlin Wall was an area where both real and fictional spies sneaked in to either side to carry out operations, recruit potential defectors, smuggle secrets, and all sorts of other operations. So it’s appropriate the Berlin Wall is where both John le Carre’s seminal and career-making novel The Spy who Came In from the Cold, and director Martin Ritt’s terrific film adaptation of it, starts out.

Control (Cyril Cusack), Leamas’ boss, proposes he go back “into the cold”.

Graham Greene, considered one of the finest spy novelists of the time (as well as novelist, period), had written a novel called A Burnt Out Case (ironically, not a spy novel – or as Greene called them, entertainments – but one of his literary novels), and that certainly describes le Carre’s hero, Alec Leamas (Richard Burton). When we first see him, he’s in a trenchcoat waiting inside a checkpoint station at the Wall, while a CIA agent (Tom Stern) brings him coffee. Leamas is waiting for Karl Riemeck, an agent he’s running; the last agent, in fact, that hasn’t been killed by Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter Van Eyck), the ruthless head of the East German SDS (the German KGB). Leamas wearily assures the CIA agent Riemeck will come, and that the agent can go home if he wants. Leamas is pale, his eyes are hollow, and his voice is raspy. He soon has one more reason to worry; though Riemeck does show up, and seems to be free and clear at first, he’s eventually shot down by the East German guards.

Leamas and Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), the librarian he becomes attracted to.

Leamas, bitter and bone-weary, goes back to London to meet up with Control (Cyril Cusack), the head of British Intelligence. After perfunctorily offering Leamas a desk job (which Leamas refuses, calling himself a field man), and pretending to sympathize with Leamas losing all of his agents to Mundt while in reality being pissed about it, Control then offers Leamas another option. He’ll go back out into “the cold” one last time for an operation against Mundt. Given how much Leamas hates Mundt for who he is and what he’s done – and when Control asks Leamas what he thinks of Mundt, Leamas replies simply, “He’s a bastard” – and given it’s not a desk job, Leamas jumps at the chance. At first, Leamas seems to have been drummed out of the service. He gets a job at a library run by Miss Crail (Anne Blake), a disapproving woman who seems to spend most of the time on the phone with her mother (le Carre’s novel goes into more detail on this aspect), and soon gains the attentions of Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), a young, idealistic co-worker (she’s a member of the Communist Party) who begins an affair with him. But Leamas also goes on more drunken binges than usual, and gets arrested for trashing a grocery store when the owner won’t give him credit. After he gets out of prison, and Nan greets him there before going to work, a man named Ashe (Michael Hordern) approaches him, claiming to work for a group that helps ex-convicts. Ashe in turn introduces Leamas to a man named Carlton (Robert Hardy), who also claims to be with the group, and will offer money to Leamas if he leaves the country and tells him a story for his “newspaper”.

Carlton (Robert Hardy) recruits Leamas for the East Germans.

It turns out, of course, Ashe and Carlton are East German spies (along with Peters (Sam Wanamaker), whom Leamas meets in Holland) who are working for Fiedler (Oskar Werner), Mundt’s second-in-command. It’s all part of the plan Control and George Smiley (Rupert Davies) have to discredit Mundt. Through an operation Leamas participated in called “Operation Rolling Stone”, they hope to “prove” Mundt is really working for British intelligence. Leamas readily agrees, but asks Control to leave Nan (whom he spends the night with before going to Holland) out of everything. Soon, however, Leamas finds out things are not what they seem.

In an interview included on the Criterion edition of the film, le Carre noted while the novel and movie (adapted for the screen by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper) were praised for “realism”, he actually was writing a romantic novel, and not in the sense of the relationship between Leamas and Nan (Liz Gold in the book; whether it was changed to Nan Perry in the movie to downplay her Jewishness or because Burton in real life was involved with Elizabeth Taylor and he didn’t want a similar name to cause a distraction, is open to speculation), though there’s that too. Rather, it’s the story of Leamas falling out of love with the Service. As noted, he’s burnt out thanks to all the agents he’s lost, but while he hides his idealism as much as he can (when Nan asks if he believes in anything, Leamas replies, “I believe the 11 bus will take me to Hammersmith; I don’t believe it’s driven by Father Christmas”), it’s still there, and what keeps him going. Without giving anything away, this is what makes it all the more heartbreaking when what’s left of Leamas’ idealism runs up against the reality of the situation.

Mundt (Peter Van Eyck, left) sits impassively with his lawyer (George Voskovec, right).

Of course, none of that discounts how much of a corrective both the book and the movie were. When le Carre’s novel was published in 1963, the James Bond novels had become a phenomenon both in England and the U.S., and the movie versions had started to gain traction; by 1965, when Ritt’s movie came out, the Bond movies had become a worldwide phenomenon, and the image of a spy being a glamorous profession was already inside people’s minds (Sidney J. Furie’s adaptation of Len Deighton’s novel The Ipcress File, which came out several months after The Spy who Came In from the Cold, was grittier than the Bond movies, though it had its own form of cheeky humor to keep it from feeling too downbeat). Le Carre’s novel, and Ritt’s movie, by contrast, show how much of a dirty game spying is, even if it is a game. As Leamas says near the end of the movie:

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?

Leamas finally realizes what the true objective of his mission was.

Le Carre’s novel, as well as Ritt’s movie, was also one of the first works to suggest both sides were playing the spy game in equally dirty ways, and that, as Leamas says earlier in the movie, no matter what side, “it’s the innocents who get slaughtered”. At the same time, the movie also suggests the kinship that can develop between spies on opposite sides of the fence; about a quarter of it is devoted to the relationship between Leamas and Fiedler, and the respect they develop for each other despite their differences, even though it’s never said out loud.

Leamas tries to explain, and justify, himself to Nan (and to himself).

In the same interview on the Criterion disc, le Carre also mentions one of the reasons he thinks the movie was a failure at the box office – aside from the fact it was a downer, even though the novel was a best-seller – was because of Ritt’s decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white, and he thinks the movie might have played better in color. All due respect to le Carre, but I think he’s dead wrong. Perhaps in a couple of years, when cinematographers were starting to be able to get away with shooting color movies where the color was more faded and less garish, Ritt and cinematographer Oswald Morris might have made color for the film. But I don’t know if Ritt would have been able to buck the system to make it in color that way, and in any case, the black-and-white photography lends a starkness to the movie, adding weight to the somber tone of the movie.

Leamas decides to come in from the cold.

Speaking of Ritt, at first glance, I thought he was an odd choice to direct this movie, given the fact most of the movies I knew him for when I saw this, like Sounder and Norma Rae, seemed in their humanistic tone to be a far cry from le Carre’s cynical view. But le Carre clearly cared what happened to the major characters of Leamas and Nan (Liz in the novel), even as he put them through the wringer, and Ritt obviously seized on that. Having been blacklisted for having Communist sympathies in the 50’s also meant this material struck a chord for Ritt, but he doesn’t make this a treatise on Communism, being careful to show both sides at their worst (as well as their rare best). It must also be said, of course, Ritt’s (arguably) best film, Hud, featured a cynical anti-hero at the center, so the character of Alec Leamas wasn’t that much of a stretch for Ritt.

Director Martin Ritt on the Berlin Wall set in Dublin.

Burton was not the first choice for the role, nor did he seem like an obvious choice. The studio, Paramount, wanted Burt Lancaster, who, while he had the gravity for the role would otherwise have been all wrong for the part, and he thankfully turned it down. Le Carre wanted Trevor Howard or someone like him. As for Burton, while he certainly would provide enough box office clout for studio purposes, the feeling was in most circles he was a great stage actor (I never saw him on stage personally, but I’ve seen bits of the Hamlet performance that was turned into a film, which was excellent; also, my father always said his performance as King Arthur in the stage production of “Camelot” was terrific) who had squandered most of his talent in movies, with a few exceptions (Look Back in Anger). Also, Burton in those days was known as much for his off-screen activities, such as his drinking and tumultuous marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, as his performances. But while Burton and Ritt apparently quarreled throughout the shoot, I don’t think you can argue with the results on-screen. Burton is able to suggest the burnt-out shell Leamas has become, the bitterness at others and the self-loathing underneath, and the shards of humanity that remain, especially when he’s with Nan. And while he was known for going over-the-top in his performances, he’s capable of subtlety; at a trial scene near the end of the movie, the look Burton has when Leamas realizes what’s really going on is chilling to watch. Along with Look Back in Anger and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, this is his best performance on film.

George Smiley (Rupert Davies),, le Carre’s most famous character.

As for the other performances, Bloom was older than her character by at least a decade, but she comes across as a grad student still maintaining her optimism, and she and Burton (who had worked together several times, which is why he suggested her for the role) have a believable chemistry together. Mundt may not have been much of a stretch for Van Eyck, but he doesn’t play the stereotypical ex-Nazi German (which is how Mundt was written); instead, he shows the cunning underneath. In most of the performances I’ve seen Werner give, from Decision Before Dawn to Jules and Jim to Fahrenheit 451, it seems like he’s sleepy-eyed; not that he’s sleepwalking through the role, but that his eyes are half-closed, giving his characters an air of mystery, and making them inscrutable. Here, his eyes are wide open, and with his beard and cap, he also looks different from most of his roles. He’s playing a man whose somewhat friendly and businesslike exterior hides a bitterness and anger of his own, and Werner perfectly captures that. George Voskovec (12 Angry Men) has a small but memorable appearance as Mundt’s lawyer. Finally, while he’s only in two scenes, one mustn’t forget Cusack as Control. Le Carre mentions in the interview how Control is more upper class than Leamas, and without ever being obvious about it, Cusack is able to suggest Control’s intellectual auteur (of someone behind a desk, not in the field) and slight contempt for Leamas.

As I mentioned before, despite the fact the novel was a best-seller, and le Carre’s breakthrough in terms of quality and acclaim, the movie did not perform well at the box office, though it was critically acclaimed and was nominated for two Oscars (Best Actor for Burton – he lost to Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou – and Best Art Direction/Set Direction, which it lost to Ship of Fools). In fairness, none of the movies based on le Carre’s novels have set the box office on fire – even the recent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which did relatively well worldwide, wasn’t a bit hit. However, while The Spy who Came In from the Cold may not have been a game changer as a movie the way it was received as a novel (though, to be fair, le Carre was covering territory such writers as Greene and Eric Ambler had covered), it still holds up as one of the best, if not the best, serious movies dealing with the so-called “Great Game” of spying and how it operated during the Cold War.

Reel 72: Films Based on John LeCarré

Our look at spy films takes a decidedly more serious turn, as we go from the wackiness of The In-Laws and Top Secret! to the Cold War grittiness of today’s films based on novels by John LeCarré.

We begin with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, from 1965. This film, directed by Martin Ritt, deals with a spy (Richard Burton) whose entire team, it seems, has been burned. He’s encouraged to retire…or perhaps take on one more caper.

In Part 2, we jump forward to 1990 and The Russia House, directed by Fred Schepisi. Sean Connery is a British spy (wait…what??) who is tasked with finding the author of a document containing very sensitive information.

Both films have a love story subplot, but the resolutions aren’t the same.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

In Episode 73, we look at another pair of John LeCarré novels turned into films. We start with Then its on to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from 2011. Then we take on A Most Wanted Man from 2014, which incidentally is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last leading role (one of the Hunger Games sequels came out after this one.) Join us, won’t you?

Top Secret! (1984) – Review

“It all sounds like some bad movie.” – Hillary (Lucy Gutteridge) and Nick (Val Kilmer).

In addition to being a fan of rock music, as I’ve made clear, I’m also a fan of movies that are musicals that use rock, though not all; I’m not, for example, a big fan of Elvis Presley’s movies, even the ones that are considered his better movies (Michael Curtiz’s King Creole). I am also a big fan of spy movies, mostly the ones that lean towards John le Carre, but though I’m not a big fan of the James Bond franchise (I do like a few of the movies), I do like the ones that are more entertaining. For their follow-up to Airplane!, Jim Abrahams, and David and Jerry Zucker decided to parody spy movies with Elvis movies, and the result, Top Secret!, is just as funny and entertaining for me.

Col. Von Horst (Warren Clarke) warns Nick not to get involved.

The Elvis figure here is Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer), a popular singer who gets sent to a East German music festival. The spy part comes when, while at a restaurant, he comes across Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), a mysterious woman who is part of a resistance movement against the government, and who is trying to free her father (Michael Gough), a scientist who is being forced to build a weapon for the government (who are Communists, but act like WWII Nazis). And…well, maybe it’s better if Nick tells it:

Nick: Listen to me, Hillary. I’m not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island, who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Hillary: I know. It all sounds like some bad movie.
(the two pause, and then slowly turn to look at the camera)

Nigel (Christopher Villiers) with Hillary and Nick.

As with Airplane!, ZAZ (who directed by themselves, but co-wrote the movie with Martyn Burke) avoided casting the movie with comic actors, or comedians. This was Kilmer’s first movie (I’ll talk more about his performance below), but since then, he’s only occasionally done comedies (Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Because most of the cast, except for Kilmer and Omar Sharif (who plays one of the resistance members; he also was not known for comedy, except for being in one of the Pink Panther films), was British, they weren’t as well known to American audiences, but they mostly had a background in drama, just as the Airplane! cast did.

Gutteridge was known for appearing in two miniseries, Little Gloria: Happy At Last (about Gloria Vanderbilt) and an adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Jeremy Kemp, who plays one of the villains, was known for appearing in war movies like Operation Crossbow and The Blue Max (he even wears a prop from that movie in this movie), and was also in the miniseries The Winds of War. Christopher Villiers, who plays Nigel, the leader of the resistance (and, as alluded to above, Hillary’s childhood lover), was best known at the time for appearing in a miniseries version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which is probably her least comic work. Warren Clarke, who plays another villain, was best known for appearing in A Clockwork Orange, and had also appeared in the miniseries’ Reilly: Ace of Spies and The Jewel in the Crown. Peter Cushing, who played another resistance member, was, of course, best known for playing Grand Moff Tarkin in the first Star Wars movie, and was also known for his appearances in Hammer Horror films.* Finally, Gough had worked steadily in movies and TV for almost four decades previous, and little of it was comedy. So, while the movie doesn’t have the advantage Airplane! did of having actors playing against their specific images, it does have people who take the ridiculousness on display straight, making it all the funnier.

Du Quois (Harry Ditson) and the rest of the Resistance.

Just as with Airplane!, ZAZ are spoofing a lot of different movies, not just the plots of WWII/Cold War spy movies (in particular a 1944 movie called The Conspirators with Paul Henreid and Hedy Lamarr, though there’s a bit of Casablanca added in for good measure) and Elvis movies. When Hillary tells Nick about how she met Nigel, the flashback scenes are a spoof of the 1980 version of The Blue Lagoon that starred Brooke Shields (the two are able to build a house with garage opener just with materials on the island; also, there’s a sex scene that goes beyond what was in that movie), there’s another Jaws spoof (when Nigel and another resistance member are disguised as a cow, and a bull pursues them, the theme from that movie plays), the TV show Bonanza (the climax is a Western-style barfight – underwater), and The Wizard of Oz (when Hillary is saying goodbye to everyone at the end, she adds, “And I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!”). As with the previous movie, ZAZ throws a lot of gags, often in the same scene, the perfect example being the scene with Cushing, which is in a bookstore; the entire scene was filmed backwards (only Nick and Hillary sliding *up* the fire pole, and a dog walking, give it away), and the dialogue is played backward; not only that, but the “book” Hilary asks for is titled “Europe on 5 Quaaludes a Day”. Not only that, but they don’t just do a gag, they take it as far as it can go. My favorite example is when Nick and the Resistance are at a restaurant, two girls come up and ask if he’s Nick Rivers, he demurs, saying he’s Mel Torme, Nigel starts to point out all the bad things that have happened to the resistance since Nick showed up – as well as the fact there’s a traitor within – and ends with, “How do we know he’s *not* Mel Torme?” (after this, to top it off, Nick does a number, and a resistance member exclaims, “This is not Mel Torme!”). And, of course, they go for any gag, no matter how dumb, and boy are they dumb (Hillary gives another resistance member an envelope that has to be mailed out by no later than that night; it is, of course, an envelope for Publisher’s Clearing House).

As it’s a spoof of Elvis movies, there’s a lot of music in the movie too, starting with the opening credits, where Nick performs “Skeet Surfin'”, which is a spoof of Beach Boys songs, over a montage of people surfing while skeet shooting (it’s as crazy as it sounds). At the concert, he performs a song called “Spend This Night with Me”, and as he sings about all the things he’ll do if his baby leaves him, we see Nick lie on train tracks, trying to hang himself in a noose, sticking his head into an oven, and so on. Even the real songs he does – “Tutti Frutti” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” – are done in a jokey way; for the former, it’s done with an orchestra of elderly musicians who ends up smashing their instruments a la Pete Townshend, while the latter ends up as a jingle Nick claims to have written when he was younger (and leads into a great gag parodying how Code-era movies would cut away to certain objects when the two leads started to kiss each other). And Kilmer, who did his own singing, performs all of the songs well. Even the songs which Nick doesn’t sing are funny; when Nick and Hillary are given a ride by a horse-driven carriage (or rather, a Shetland pony), we hear singing, but it’s the horse (and yes, we get the inevitable gag when they ask about his voice, “He caught a cold last week, and he’s just a little hoarse”; the horse then sings “A Hard Day’s Night”). Also at the concert, Nick sings the song, “How Silly Can You Get?”, and Top Secret! answers that question in a very funny way.

*-As it happens, Cushing and Gough had both made guest appearances on the TV show The Avengers – not to be confused with the Marvel Comic or movie spin-offs – but while that show was tongue-in-cheek, they played it straight in their roles.

The In-Laws (1979) – Review

“There’s always a reason” – Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk) checks the engravings.

“I’m being irrational. I sit there listening to stories about the Guacamole Act of 1917 and tsetse flies carrying off small children and I’m being irrational?”
“I have flames on my car! I HAVE FLAMES ON MY CAR!”
“You’re dead, right? Good!”
“Are you interested in joining (the CIA)? I tell you, the benefits are fantastic. The trick is not to get killed; that’s really the key to the whole benefits program.”
“Serpentine, Shel, serpentine!”
“You know, I’m such a great driver, it’s incomprehensible that they took my license away.”

If you laughed in recognition at any of the above quotes, you know the joys of The In-Laws, written by Andrew Bergman and directed by Arthur Hiller, one of the great nutty comedies ever made. Farces like this are extremely hard to pull off, which make this all the more joyous that Bergman and Hiller, along with the cast, pull it off.

“Mr. Hirshorn, I cannot work this way.” – Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) deals with an unruly patient.

The in-laws in question are Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) and Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk). Sheldon is a dentist who works in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with his wife Carol (Nancy Dussault). His daughter Barbara (Penny Peyser) is marrying Tommy Ricardo (Michael Lembeck), Vince’s son. Vince, who claims to be in international consulting, turns Sheldon off the first time they meet – at a dinner of both families, just days before the wedding – by his wild tales about his time in Guatemala (the quote about the Guacamole Act of 1917 refers to that), as well as his wild shifts in mood (Vince goes from crying at Sheldon’s toast to asking to use the phone and then yelling at Tommy when he makes a crack about the mysterious calls Vince always makes). Barbara and Carol are convinced Sheldon is just anxious about the wedding, and urge him to give Vince a chance. Sheldon gets more than he bargained for when he agrees, only to find out Vince is really a CIA agent, and is involved in a scheme to bring stolen U.S. engravings (which he arranged to have stolen) to a Latin American dictator (Richard Libertini) who wants to ruin the world’s economy by printing up millions of dollars of money from the U.S. and other First World countries.

“STOP WITH THE SOUP!” – Sheldon is put off by Vince’s crazy scheme.

The movie started out with the studio behind the buddy cop movie Freebie and the Bean, which Arkin appeared in opposite James Caan, wanting to make a sequel. As Arkin didn’t particularly care for that movie, he declined, but he did see the comic potential of putting himself on-screen opposite someone who would drive him crazy, and he thought Falk, best known at the time for Columbo and his collaborations with John Cassavetes (Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence), would be perfect for that. Arkin, who also served as executive producer of the movie, zeroed in on Bergman after reading his original treatment for Blazing Saddles (under the title Tex X), and again, Bergman’s screenplay is a large part of why the movie works. The plot comes off like clockwork, which is always key for a farce like this, and even the exposition scenes – in a diner, where Vince has to explain the plot to Sheldon – are made funny because of the dialogue (“Why am I getting excited? The central piece of evidence in the biggest federal crime since the atomic spy case, AND YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I’M GETTING EXCITED?!?”), and because it’s grounded in the conflict between Sheldon’s increasingly harried nature and Vince’s unruffled calm. And Bergman, at his best (Blazing Saddles, The Freshman) brings together incongruous elements to make them funny, like a firing squad singing “Buffalo Gal Can You Come Out Tonight?”, or Vince telling a cab driver (David Paymer in his first role) about the benefits of working at the CIA (the line about “benefits” I referred to above). Bergman would later tell “Entertainment Weekly” that while he hated constructing plots, he loved constructing characters, and Sheldon and Vince are the best he ever created.

“My beautiful American friends…” – General Garcia (Richard Libertini) with Vince and Sheldon.

Of course, Arkin and Falk deserve a lot of the credit for the movie as well. As I mentioned when writing about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Catch-22, Arkin was mostly known at the time for bringing a manic intensity to his performances (he’s since shown he can be restrained as well), and he’s definitely manic here, but it works perfectly for the part of someone who has unwillingly fallen down the rabbit hole. As for Falk, as Charles Taylor pointed out when reviewing the so-so 2003 remake for Salon (with Albert Brooks in the Arkin role and Michael Douglas in the Falk role), what makes Falk so funny is he plays Vince less as James Bond and more like an accountant discussing actuarial tables.* In addition, while white actors off course need to stop playing non-white roles, Libertini is hysterical playing a caricature of a dictator, who does a Senor Wences impersonation and tells Sheldon and Vince he is a pacifist by nature before adding, “I wish I had a choice but to kill you”). There’s also great work in smaller roles from Ed Begley Jr. as a CIA agent who tells Sheldon Vince is crazy (“I could tell you stories”) and James Hong as a co-pilot of a private plane Vince arranges for, who gives the traditional before-the-flight safety instructions to Sheldon, in Cantonese. It also helps Hiller keeps this all on an even keel. Hiller was never one of my favorite directors (I’m not a fan of his most well-known movie, Love Story), but he did make two other good offbeat comedies – The Hospital, written by Paddy Chayefsky, and The Lonely Guy, based on a book by Bruce Jay Friedman – so he knew how not to get in the way of great material, and The In-Laws is great material.

*-This is one of only a handful of movies made after 1960 my late father liked – he would often show it to house guests – and the only disagreement he and I ever had over the film was who was funnier, Arkin (me) or Falk (him).

Cold War (2018) – Review

Zula (Joanna Kulig) – front left – with the rest of the troupe.

Along with film, two subjects that interest me very much are history and music. Both of these subjects have fascinated me in my life in general, as well as when they’ve been the subjects of films I’ve liked. Both subjects are placed front and center in Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski’s follow-up to Ida (my favorite film released in 2014), and if it’s not quite up to the level of that film, it’s still very good.

Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) conducts an orchestra.

Co-written by Pawlikowski and Janusz Glowacki (who died before the film was released), the story starts in 1949 Poland, where Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a pianist, and Irena (Agata Kulesza), an ethnomusicologist, are traveling the countryside to find a troupe of performers to preserve and stage the folk music of the country. They’re accompanied by Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), a government official who is nevertheless genuinely moved by what he sees and hears. One of the many performers Wiktor and Irena audition/listen to is Zula (Joanna Kulig), who sings a folk song with Anna (Ania Zagorska), another performer (the song they sing, “Ja Za Woda, Ty Za Woda”, translates as “Beyond the Waters, you and I”), and she immediately captivates Wiktor (when he asks, “What else have you got?”, she replies, “To sing?”). Zula ends up being the star of the show, and she and Wiktor begin a passionate affair, even after she admits she’s there to spy on him. However, Wiktor becomes upset about the Polish government, under instructions from Moscow, ordering the music to be propaganda for the government, so he and Zula plan to meet in Berlin and defect to Paris from there, but Zula never shows. Years later, Wiktor is now living in Paris, making his living as a pianist, when he gets a letter from Zula. They meet in a café, and even though he’s living with Juliette (Jeanne Balibar), a poet, and she’s involved with someone else, Wiktor and Zula continue their affair. Wiktor then goes to Yugoslavia when the troupe (which Zula is still in) is performing there, but it turns out the man Zula is involved with is Kaczmarek, who has Wiktor kicked out of the country. A few years later, Zula makes it back to Paris, and she and Wiktor take up again (even though she’s married; he’s broken things off with Juliette but they’re still friends), but they’re miserable there.

Pawlikowski based this loosely on the story of his parents – his father was a medic, while his mother was an aspiring ballerina, but they had the same kind of tempestuous, on-and-off again affair Viktor and Zula have here (they had the same names as well). He uses music to provide the subtext of the relationship between the two of them. This is a tricky way to tell the story – Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. and Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart also tried this approach, and while they were both fascinating to watch, they weren’t quite able to pull it off – but Pawlikowski is able to bring it off. Part of it is how he grounds the material in real-life details, like the Polish folk music group (based on a real group), or the song “Dwa Serduszka” (which translates as “Two Hearts”), an old Polish folk song, that is performed throughout the movie, including as a jazz standard by Zula in Paris. Pawlikowski also pays attention to the atmosphere of each place, as well as the politics of Poland’s Communist government (when Wiktor wants to go back to visit Zula, everyone makes plain to him how bad an idea that is), and how the bohemian atmosphere of Paris, despite being free of oppression, feels oppressive in its own way to Wiktor and Zula (this was also a major plot point in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and works just as well here). Part of it is the way Pawlikowski, as he did in IDA, working again with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, shoots the film in black-and-white and in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of the time period, which not only fits with that time period, but also the setting. More even so than Ida, the black and white photography is also gorgeous, with the white (the Polish landscape) contrasting with the black (the smoky nightclub Wiktor plays in while in Paris) more than any movie since perhaps Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s.

Mostly, however, it’s the music. Pawlikowski uses a number of Polish songs, and not just the two I mentioned above, but he also uses music from elsewhere. In IDA, jazz was the music of choice even though it was considered decadent by the Soviet Union, but as Paris was the major European city that welcomed jazz, it’s played throughout those sequences, and Pawlikowski serves up some good songs to establish mood and the period, from Zula and Wiktor performing together “I Loves You Porgy” (from Porgy & Bess) to the two dancing to Ira Woods’ performance of the great Louis Jordan song “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” to standards like Billie Holiday’s version of “The Man I Love”. Pawlikowski also throws in “Rock Around the Clock”, which Zula dances to in the nightclub at one point while Wiktor looks on, perhaps to show how things were changing. All of this music expresses the feelings Wiktor and Zula have for each other, even if their conflicting personalities get in the way. The music also provides a counterpoint to the elliptical way Pawlikowski films this movie, from the fadeouts to the dialogue (Zula is rumored to have killed her father; when Wiktor asks her about it, she says, “He mistook me for my mother, until my knife showed him the difference”).

Kulig, who also had a small role in Ida as a singer (before that, she was also in Pawlikowski’s previous film The Woman in the Fifth, which I think is his weakest film to date), completely lights up the screen whenever she appears, and she also sings well. Kot, who Danny Boyle wanted to cast in the upcoming James Bond movie (he left the project when the studio overruled him on that), has the grungy cool of a jazz pianist, but he’s also able to suggest deeper feelings underneath, especially when he and Zula first meet again in Paris and he wants to know why she never showed up (she argues she wasn’t “good enough”). Like IDA, COLD WAR runs less than 90 minutes, and I can understand those who wish it had run longer and been more developed, but what it does show us is a feast for the eyes and the ears.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) – Review

1968, of course, was a year where it seemed like the world was on fire. After the Tet Offensive that happened during the Vietnam War, while the North Vietnamese lost the battle, the battle itself convinced many in the U.S. the war could not be won, and the protests against the war increased significantly, not only in the U.S. (culminating in the notorious protests at the Chicago Democratic Convention), but around the world; the May riots in Paris that year being one of the more prominent examples. It’s important to remember, however, the protests that were happening that year weren’t entirely about the war, or anti-U.S. or anti-Western sentiment. 1968 was also the year of the “Prague Spring”, where, in Czechoslovakia, people were rebelling against the strictures of Soviet rule, and trying to reform the government to allow more freedom of speech, press, and travel. Unfortunately, the Soviet government did not take this lying down, and in August of that year, they invaded the country and restored the totalitarian government. It’s against that backdrop Philip Kaufman’s great film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which he and Jean-Claude Carriere adapted from the novel by Milan Kundera, takes place.

Tereza (Juliette Binoche) and Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) after their wedding.

The film concerns Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), a surgeon in 1968 Prague, and an inveterate womanizer (his typical come-on line is, “Take off your clothes”). Though he sleeps around with a number of women, the one he always returns to is Sabina (Lena Olin), an artist. One day, while traveling to a small village, he meets Tereza (Juliette Binoche), a waitress at a bar. They soon fall in love and get married, and Tomas even encourages Tereza’s interest in photography. However, Tereza can’t stand the fact Tomas continues to sleep with other women. As if that wasn’t enough, when things in Czechoslovakia seem to be changing for the better, the Soviet Union sends troops and tanks in. Sabina, Tereza, and Tomas all flee to Geneva, where Sabina takes up with Franz (Derek de Lint, who played the collaborator in Soldier of Orange), a professor whom she likes, but doesn’t want to get emotionally involved with (among other things, as she puts it, “He doesn’t like my hat”). Tereza tries to sell the photographs she took of the invasion, but the magazine editors in Geneva consider the invasion old news, and suggest she take fashion pictures. Tereza tries to do so – she even visits Sabina, in a scene I’ll talk more about below – but finds herself unable to function in Geneva. She ends up talking Tomas in returning to Prague, even though the repressive government has been restored. Not only that, but Tomas cannot get a job as a surgeon anymore because he refuses to renounce a satirical article he wrote before the invasion criticizing the government (he gets a job as a window washer instead), and though Sabina has gone to America, he continues his womanizing, which continues to drive Tereza to despair, even though she has her own extramarital affair with an engineer (Stellan Skarsgard) she meets one night while at her old waitress job.

In his previous movie, The Right Stuff, Kaufman edited his actors into historical footage when Alan Shepherd was greeted by President Kennedy after his flight into space. He does the same thing with the invasion footage, as we see Tereza taking pictures of what’s happening, and he does it even more seamlessly. Since Czechoslovakia was still under Soviet control at the time, of course, this archival footage was the only part of the movie actually shot in Prague (Lyon, France doubled for Prague for the most part), but because of how well Kaufman and the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist shoot the rest of the movie, it doesn’t feel out of place. Other than the revolution, the sexual escapades depicted here were the main draw of the movie, yet Kaufman and Nykvist don’t shoot them for easy titillation. The best example of that comes in that scene where Tereza visits Sabina to photograph her. There’s definitely an eroticism about the scene, especially when Sabina decides to turn the tables and photograph Tereza (and even uses Tomas’ come-on line, “Take off your clothes”), but it feels genuine rather than cheap or exploitative. The movie packs a lot into its nearly three hour running time, yet it never feels rushed, as Kaufman is able to keep a light tone to the whole thing, even with all of the events happening.

In Kundera’s novel, he tells the story in a non-linear fashion, and the characters are as much symbols as they are flesh and blood. The characters are still symbols in the movie, but the actors make them come alive. In later years, Day-Lewis would disparage his own work here, and I don’t really understand why, as he’s never seemed more relaxed on screen, or funnier (the closest he came was in the title role in Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN). Even when he’s sticking to his principles in not renouncing that article, Day-Lewis acts it in an offhand way, and he has marvelous chemistry with his co-stars. Binoche was early in her career (her most notable movies before this were Jean-Luc Godard’s HAIL MARY and Leos Carax’s MAUVAIS SANG), and this was her first role in English, but she’s up to the challenge. It seems Tereza represents the “darkness” that’s opposed to the light, which is not only a conceit, but a reactionary one, but Binoche makes her into a full-blooded character instead, as a woman who wants to live where she’s comfortable, and just doesn’t understand why men cheat; it’s when she and Tomas are alone in the country late in the movie, with their dog and other friends, that she only truly feels happy. Sabina is arguably the biggest conceit of all – the male fantasy of the friend with benefits – but Olin (most known at the time for appearing in Ingmar Bergman’s FANNY & ALEXANDER and AFTER THE REHEARSAL) likewise makes her a believable character of flesh and blood. Actors often say their wardrobe helps them define the character they play, and I don’t know if that’s how Olin felt about the bowler hat Sabina wears, but she makes it an integral part of the character. There’s also good work from de Lint, Skarsgard, Donald Moffat (as another surgeon), and Bergman stalwart Erland Josephson (as a janitor). Kaufman seems to have lost his way after this (his only other good film that I’ve seen is the 2000 period drama QUILLS), but THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING stands as a great movie about sex, politics, and freedom.