Though I obviously have no problem ranking my favorite films (even though I sometimes struggle with the order, as well as whether I can limit it to 10 favorites per year), and I also don’t have an issue with ranking individual performances, I’m not really good at ranking individual actors in their overall careers. Nevertheless, I can probably say my favorite actor of my generation (born around the same time) is Philip Seymour Hoffman, even though he’s been dead for several years. While there have been times I thought his performances fell short (State and Main, Jack Goes Boating), or he was wasted on the role (Moneyball), he was never bad, even if I didn’t like the film he was in (Happiness, The Ides of March). More to the point, Hoffman was great in so many great films, including his last major leading role, in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, adapted by Andrew Bovell from the novel by John le Carre.
Gunther with Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams).
As with the novel, the film is set in Hamburg, which had been where many of the people who helped plan the attacks on 9/11 had gathered for a time. Therefore, German and American governments are on the lookout for anyone who might be suspicious. So, when Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Muslim son of a Russian father (a colonel) and Chechen mother, comes into Hamburg without documents concerning his identity, only with a letter and key concerning money in a bank that belongs to him, the German and American governments start watching him, particularly Gunther Bachman (Hoffman), a German intelligence officer who believes Issa can be pointed towards Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a Muslim scholar who preaches against Arab terrorist acts, but whom Gunther suspects is intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally) funding terrorist groups, including those involved in 9/11. While Issa gets taken in by a Muslim family, and they in turn approach Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), a human rights lawyer – who, in turn, approaches Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), a banker who handles the money that’s due Issa – Gunther tries to set up Issa, with the (reluctant) help of Annabel and Tommy, so he can approach Dr. Abdullah, and the help of his team, including Irna (Nina Hoss), Gunther’s right hand, and Max (Daniel Bruhl). At the same time, Gunther is also trying to keep those who simply want to round up Issa and Dr. Abdullah at bay, including Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), Gunther’s superior, and Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), a CIA liaison whom Gunther has a history with.
Gunther with Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright).
As a character, Gunther should be a familiar type to any le Carre fan; you could imagine le Carre, or his agent or publisher, asking the question, “What if George Smiley was involved in the War on Terror?” Gunther believes that spying involves patience (or, as a character in “The Russia House” puts it, “Spying is waiting”), checking facts and intelligence against other sources, recruiting sources, following people for long periods of time before moving in on them, and in general, avoiding the smash and grab routine of the CIA and his superiors. Gunther also doesn’t believe Karpov is a menace, unlike Dieter, and while he’s not above playing bad cop with Annabel to get her to work with him (Irna plays good cop), he wants her, and Tommy, to work with him, not against him, to help keep Issa safe. Le Carre’s novel, while being a pointed critique against the way the U.S. operated during the War on Terror, concentrated more on Issa, Annabel and Tommy, with Gunther merely being an equal among them. You could argue by pulling the focus towards Gunther, Corbijn and Bovell are marginalizing Issa and the other Muslim characters, but I don’t think they treat Issa and Dr. Abdullah in a clichéd way, and there’s certainly a lot to be gained from critiquing the War on Terror from the inside, in seeing how gathering intelligence should be done by people who know how. Corbijn’s previous film, The American, also dealt with that type of world, but while it featured a sharp performance by George Clooney in the title role, Corbijn didn’t have a handle on the story the way he does here. He and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme don’t light the movie like a usual spy movie, but they do capture how tense the atmosphere is, as well as the divide between the haves (Tommy) and the have-nots (the family Issa stays with). I also give Corbijn full credit for not compromising the ending, which is even more of a gut-punch than it was in the novel.
Gunther with Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe).
Bruhl, best known here for his work in Inglourious Basterds and Captain America: Civil War, doesn’t have a lot to do here, but he’s convincing as an intelligence officer and electronics expert. Hoss, best known for the films she’s done with director Christian Petzold, brings strength and intelligence to Irna, and she keeps up well with Hoffman. Wright is able to keep you guessing throughout of her motives. McAdams’ German accent is a bit shaky at times, but she carries herself well as the lawyer, and she’s especially good when Annabel is with Issa and trying not to reveal she’s been recruited by Gunther. And Dafoe is dependable as always. But it’s Hoffman’s show here. He looks ragged here, which fits the character (who seems to live on coffee, cigarettes and booze), but you can always see his mind working, and he even brings a bit of humor to the role (when Martha asks if his being in Hamburg is punishment for his networks being blown in Berlin, he replies, “Depends on whether you like Hamburg”). A Most Wanted Man may not be as morally complex as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but it hits you on a gut level just the same, and it gave one of the best actors of all time a great role to end his career on, even if it was sadly cut short.
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.
Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch).
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.
Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy).
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.
Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong).
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’sPeople (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.
Smiley with Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke).
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.
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.
Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer).
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.
Walter (Ken Russell).
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.
“Spying is waiting.” Barley and Ned.
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.
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.
Fiedler (Oskar Werner).
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.