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Richard Burton lands in Cold War trouble in classic Le Carre adaptation The Spy Why Came In From the Cold |
Director: Martin Ritt
Cast: Richard Burton (Alec Leamas), Claire Bloom (Nan
Perry), Oskar Werner (Fiedler), Sam Wanamaker (Peters), George Voskovec (East
German Defence Attorney), Rupert Davies (George Smiley), Cyril Cusack
(Control), Peter van Eyck (Hans-Dieter Mundt), Michael Hordern (Ashe), Robert
Hardy (Dick Carlton), Bernard Lee (Patmore)
Spy stories fall into two camps. You get the wham-bam blast
of James Bond and then you also get the grimy, isn’t-this-a-damn-dirty-trade
stories that John Le Carré helped to turn into a major alternative. The book that
really kicked off Le Carré’s career was The Spy Who
Came in From the Cold, a slim, brilliantly written story of spies working
exclusively in shades of grey. The book was a smash, the film was inevitable,
and a damn fine film it turned out to be.
Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, a former head of Berlin Station
for the British Secret Service, who is recruited by the services’ leader
Control (Cyril Cusack) as part of an elaborate scheme to discredit the cunning
and dangerous head of the Stasi office in Berlin, Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van
Eyck). Leamas will go through a pretence of disgraced dismissal, alcoholism,
jail time and half a dozen other indecencies to attract the attention of the
East German defector recruiters in the UK. But will the relationship he
develops during his disgrace with librarian and idealistic communist Nan Perry
(Claire Bloom) endanger the whole mission?
The Spy
Who Came in From the Cold is shot in a grimy, gloomy black-and-white which
is completely appropriate for the morally questionable escapades its characters
get up to. Like Le Carré’s novel, the ends justify any means here,
and questions of morality and justice are best benched. Characters who can’t
let themselves to forget justice are doomed in this film. Genuine shows of real
emotion and feeling are generally signs in this film that a person is doomed.
Martin Ritt’s literate script captures the style and tone of Le
Carré
extremely well – this is still one of the best, truest and most faithful
capturing of Le Carré on the screen – and his direction also has a
wonderful mixture of shabby kitchen-sink realism and classic Hollywood film
noir class that makes for a brilliantly involving package. The pace of the film
holds pretty well, even if it does sag during much of the recruitment process
of Leamas by the East German authorities, and the final court room trial of
Mundt (with its intricate exploration of the complex plotting of the novel) is
extremely involving.
The film also has the benefit of a number of terrific
performances, led by Richard Burton in the lead. By this stage of his career,
Burton was already felt by many to be lost to serious acting in favour of big
budget, Liz Taylor-starring pictures and Hollywood entertainment. But he rouses
himself here to give one of his best ever performances. Leamas is a shabby,
beaten down, little man (despite being played by Burton!) whose chippiness,
dissatisfaction and aggression make him perfect as a possible defector.
Burton’s Leamas is also deep down sick and tired of the world of spying, its
betrayals and lies, and sickened with self-disgust at his own involvement in
it. Burton skilfully underplays the role throughout, largely ignoring any
option of grandstanding or big acting moments – instead he is as compromised,
grey and lost as the rest of the film, in a superb performance of cynical
disaffection.
Claire Bloom is rather affecting as Nan (hilariously, her
name was changed from Liz in the book as the producers feared she would be
confused with the rather more famous Liz in Burton’s life) and Oskar Werner
gives the film a major burst of energy just as it is flagging from one
interrogation of Leamas too many, as a chippy, eager, sharp Stasi officer, who
is determined to see justice done. The rest of the cast are filled out with
some classy Brit character actors, who excel from suave (Robert Hardy) to seedy
(Michael Hordern), while Cyril Cusack brings “Control” to cynical life and
Rupert Davies gets to the be the first actor to play George Smiley on screen
(even if he is only really an extra here).
Spy’s main problem
is that question of pace. As Leamas is handed from character actor to character
actor for a series of interrogations and movements from A to B (all to build
his cover story of defector) you feel the pace start to drag at times. In fact
you are longing to actually meet shadowy antagonist Mundt (played with
flinty-eyed cruelty by Peter van Eyck) just to start putting faces to names.
When the Secret Service scheme finally starts to play out in an East German
tribunal, more than enough time has passed.
But what Ritt does so well is keeping that tonal sense of
there always being another shady, compromising twist around the corner. All is
never what it seems, and the film ends with an especially bleak series of
footnotes as we find out just how ruthless both sides are prepared to be in
this soulless chess game of Cold War politics. It’s the moments like this that Spy Who Came in From the Cold really
nails. For Le Carré fans the film is a must: for those less interested in the world
of espionage, they may find it takes a little too much time.
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