Let's start out here by limbering up your rusty logic skills with some of those SAT-style analogies. We'll start with an easy one. Ian Fleming is to James Bond what John Le Carré is to X. What is X? Let's have it! Come on! Time is running out! Beeeeeep! What's that? "George Smiley," you say? Oh, very good! George Smiley was the antihero spy in several John Le Carré novels. You get to move onto the next round. Now try this one! Batman films are to, say, The French Connection what Bond films are to X. What is X? Well, what is it? Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality 2? No, I'm sorry, but that was . . . not even close. Go to the back of the line. The answer is the film under review here, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton in an adaptation of the Le Carré novel of the same name. Batman and 007 films are cartoonish, escapist depictions of crime fighting and the spy game respectively, while The French Connection and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provide substantially realistic stories in the same two genre.

Historical Background: British author John Le Carré was actually born David Cornwell in 1931, in Poole, Dorset, England. David was raised mainly by his father, after his mother abandoned the family when he was five. At least papa stuck by him! Or, did he? Ronnie Cornwall, the father, was something of a Gatsby-like con artist who made and lost several fortunes through financial wheeling-and-dealing, some of it legal and some not. When the elder Cornwell was absent, in prison, David pretended that the prison business was just a cover while his father was performing secret missions as a spy for Queen and country. David was so unhappy at the Sherbone, an upper-class preparatory school he attended, that he transferred to a school in Switzerland and later studied German at Berne University. After performing military service in Austria, Cornwell studied modern languages at Oxford, graduating in 1956. He then tutored at Eton for two years before joining the Foreign Service.

Cornwell gained intimate knowledge of the spy game working with the British Foreign Service in West Germany, but only as a low-level desk-bound operative. He was one of the agents whose identity was betrayed by the double agent Kim Philby. Cornwell made the acquaintance of Lord Clanmorris, an operative who later wrote spy novels under the penname John Bingham ant it was Clanmorris who served, in part, as Cornwell's model for his character, George Smiley. It was not until almost 2000 that Cornwell openly acknowledged that his work in West Germany had related to espionage. Cornwell was in West Germany when the Berlin Wall was erected and it made a powerful impression on him.

Cornwell took the penname John Le Carré and published his first novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961. The book introduced his most famous character George Smiley and was an immediate success. After his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in 1963, Le Carré decided to devote himself fulltime to writing. What separates Le Carré's oeuvre from that of Fleming is that Le Carré's novels are not mere thrillers. He explores relationships among people as well as between people and the institutions of modern living. He deals with such moral problems as patriotism, the ends justifying the means, and the seedy reality of espionage activities. It is the added depth of thematic concerns that gives Le Carré the stature of a serious author. He is known for his intricate plots and intriguing dialog. Although the present film is the best of the Le Carré cinematic adaptations, you may have seen one or more already, without necessarily realizing it.

Three pretty decent ones are:

(1) The Deadly Affair (1967), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring James Mason, Simone Signoret, and Maximilian Shell, based on Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). It is not listed in the Epinions database.

(2) The Russia House (1990), directed by Fred Schepisi, starring Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Roy Schneider, based on Le Carré's 1989 novel of the same name. See George Chabot's Review.

(3) The Tailor of Panama (2001), directed by John Boorman, starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, and Jamie Lee Curtis, based on Le Carré's 1996 novel of the same name. See telynor's Review.

Two others worth passing over are:

(4) The Little Drummer Girl (1984), directed by George Roy Hill, starring Diane Keaton, Klaus Kinsky, and Yorgo Voyagis, based on Le Carré's 1983 novel of the same name. There are no reviews for it, currently, at Epinions, but here is the Listing.

(5) The Looking Glass War (1969), directed by Frank R. Pierson, Starring Christopher Jones, Pia Degermark, and Ralph Richardson, based on Le Carré's 1965 novel of the same name. There are no reviews for it, currently, at Epinions, but here is the Listing.

Then, there are two excellent BBC mini-series adaptations:

(6) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1980), directed by John Irvin and Frances Alcock, starring Alec Guinness, Patrick Stewart, and Anthony Bate, based on Le Carré's 1974 novel of the same name. Length: 290 minutes. See spelvini's Review.

(7) Smiley's People (1982), directed by Simon Langton, starring Alec Guinness, Patrick Stewart, and Curt Jurgens, based on Le Carré's 1980 novel of the same name. Length: 324 minutes. See spelvini's Review.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is special, in part because its director, Martin Ritt, had both ample qualifications as a director and a special sensitivity to the kind of dehumanizing tyranny that institutions can inflict under the pretense of a nation's security interests. Ritt was born in 1914 in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants. He was raised in Manhattan on the Lower East Side and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He attended Elon College in North Carolina on an athletic scholarship and excelled there in both boxing and football. He was drawn into theater after forming a friendship with Elia Kazan. He had leftist inclinations, performed in socially conscious plays of the depression era, and had some affiliation with the Communist Party at some point during his youth. As a consequence, he was among those blacklisted during the years of McCarthyism. For six years, from 1951 to 1956, he could find little professional work, making ends meet by teaching at an Actors Studio, where his students included Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick, and Rod Steiger.

Ritt's career was salvaged by the intervention of David Susskind, who gave him the directorial assignment for Edge of the City (1957), an adaptation of a television play. Thereafter, Ritt became known for serious films, many of them literary adaptations. The quality varied. The Long Hot Summer (1958) was the best of three Faulker adaptations. The Sound and the Fury (1959), Five Branded Women (1960), and Hud (1963) all made a mark, but The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) was his best film up to that point in his career. It was also a change of venue, since most of his previous films had been set in earthy, rural locales. The best of his later films included The Great White Hope (1970), Sounder (1972), Norma Rae (1979), Cross Creek (1983), and Nuts (1987). Sally Fields earned both an Oscar and a Cannes Best Actress Award for Norma Rae. Ritt was at his best dealing with the currents of social change or poor, lost souls at risk of being swallowed up by the impersonal "system."

The Story: I often include a lot of plot in my reviews, but not when the film is a thriller with intriguing plot twists, as this one is. I'll limit the plot synopsis to the set-up. Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), the head of the British Intelligence operation in West Berlin, waits anxiously at Checkpoint Charley, near the Berlin Wall that separated the East and West sectors of the city during the Cold War, circa 1965. He is awaiting a British agent who had been operating in the Eastern sector but, after being compromised, is trying desperately to escape back to West Berlin. The man arrives on a bicycle, passes through the gate, but is then shot dead in the transition zone, as Leamas looks on helplessly. Soon, Leamas is recalled to London by his boss, known only as Control (Cyril Cusack). Control suggests that Leamas retire to a desk job but Leamas pleads to be allowed to continue in the field as an operative. This is exactly what Control wanted to hear. He wants Leamas to "stay out in the cold" and undertake a dangerous and ambitious plot to avenge their agent's murder and eliminate the head of the East German Intelligence operation, Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck).

It's a plan centering on illusion and disinformation. Leamas will be seemingly forcibly retired and will then turn to drinking excessively. As a disaffected and down-on-his-luck former agent, he'll be bait and sure to be approached by Communist agents, looking for information. He'll furnish information incriminating to Mundt so that his second in command, Fiedler (Oskar Werner), a Jew known to harbor both ambition and hatred for the ex-Nazi Mundt, will bring about Mundt's downfall. It will all have to be done with great subtlety to be credible.

Leamas begins to play his part, drinking, getting fired from a string of jobs, and taking a new position working in a library. There, he meets a beautiful librarian, Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), who takes a shine to him and his wry sense of the absurd. She's an idealistic member of the British Communist Party, but openly so and in no way connected to espionage. Leamas and Nan begin to hit it off, but Leamas gets into an altercation with a grocer, Patmore (Bernard Lee, who later appeared as "M" in several Bond films), over credit, decks the man, and gets carted off to jail. When he's released, Nan is loyally there to greet him, but so too is a Communist agent, Ashe (Michael Hordern), masquerading as a charity worker. Ashe is a homosexual and Leamas makes contemptuous reference to that fact, it being a less tolerant era that the present. When Leamas proves to be pliable, he is gradually passed up the chain of command from Ashe to Dick Carlton (Robert Hardy), Peters (Sam Wanamaker) in the Netherlands, and, finally, to Fiedler, behind the iron curtain. Soon, Fiedler and Mundt are at loggerheads with Leamas in the middle, as the crucial witness at a tribunal that will determine who the traitor might be. Though what's transpired to this point is plenty complex enough, there are double- and triple-crosses that lay ahead.

Themes: No doubt, the spy game is hideously deceitful and sordid. Or, as Control puts it, "Occasionally we have to do wicked things." In a world where double-dealing is common currency, there can be no integrity to bolster the human soul. Little bits of information become more important than human lives, even the lives of innocent human beings. There's nothing heroic about the spies by Le Carré's accounting. According to Leamas, a spy is "someone filthy, a drunk, a queer, a henpecked husband, or a civil servant"; in other words, someone vulnerable to being turned into a tool. Some are just cowboys and Indians, brightening up what would otherwise be a dull life. The dirty little deeds that governments do in the name of national security deaden and demean us all, but we allow it to go on, behind the veil of anonymity. No one in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold triumphs in the end – not one character. That the ideologies of the two sides differ is irrelevant since neither side is governed by its ideals. Leamas finally came to understand this.

Production Values: Ritt did a highly credible job adapting Le Carré's popular novel. The screenplay is complex but credible, making you believe that it could really have happened in this way. The script is extremely taut, without a wasted frame or a lapse in tension. Despite the complexity, the story is told with enough clarity to be comprehended by alert viewers. When it was first released, this film faired better with critics than with general viewers, probably because critics watch more films and are more experienced at following complex stories. There's relatively little action – no gunplay, chases, or fistfights.

One can't resist comparing this film to the Bond series, but it's very nearly the antithesis of the 007 movies, in most respects. This film is a gritty and realistic spy story without gadgets, acrobatics, or Bond's cool demeanor. Here, the emphasis is on the psychology of warfare in the Cold War era. Thanks in large measure to dimly lit black-and-white photography, the mood of this film is dark and cold. There's not a shard of sunlight to be seen and Burton plays his part with the vacant gaze of a man already very nearly halfway to eternity. There's nothing glamorous or romantic about the spy business as depicted here. About the only aspect of Fleming's approach that Le Carré ultimately borrowed was the comforting recurrence of certain characters from one novel to another.

The most interesting aspect of the script to me is the issue of the elucidation of Burton's character. It's an issue that I could represent as either a strength or a weakness of the film. Except for the first few and last few minutes of the film, Leamas is playing a part, so as to draw the Communist agents into a trap. Therefore, what we observe from his behavior, including his dialog, is not the genuine Leamas, but Leamas playing the part of a disaffected, burned-out ex-agent. Yet, it is also apparent that Leamas is, in part, actually disaffected with the whole spy business, though not necessarily in precisely the same way that he is pretending to be for the benefit of the East Germans. We are also led to believe that Leamas really does or did have an alcohol problem, but how much of his apparent current problem is for show is unclear. One could argue that the failure to clarify Leamas's true nature before introducing the playacting element is a weakness in character development. On the other hand, our not really knowing how much of what we see of Leamas is genuine and how much false is precisely the point that the book and the film are making about the nature of being a spy. Spies never know, in dealing with one another, how much of what they see is true and how much is misleading illusion. In fact, the film suggests that spies (like lawyers) have no core values in relation to right and wrong and are simply in the business of playing a deceptive, coldly calculating, and cruel game of power. A spy, by this account, doesn't even himself know what is and is not true about himself. There was a point near the film's end where I was uncertain, as it was happening, whether Leamas was finally speaking from his heart or was still playing a part for Nan's benefit. This film has the effect of making viewers a virtual part of the spy's way of life.

Burton's exceptional performance is entirely symbiotic with Ritt's directorial effort. How a man can show so much intensity while mostly wearing a hangdog expression and behaving languorously is beyond me. Burton's stare could wither a poppy in the full flush of bloom. Burton was nominated for an Oscar for this performance. He was at the height of his powers and just a year away from his masterful performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Oskar Werner has to convey a lot of emotional range in his facial expressions in this film and does so convincingly. In fact, he won a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actor for his work here. His other most noteworthy appearances were in Decision Before Dawn (1951), Lola Montès (1955), Jules and Jim (1962), Ship of Fools (1965), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). There were also strong supporting performances from Claire Bloom, Peter Van Eyck, Cyril Cusack, Sam Wanamker, and Michael Hordern.

Bottom-Line: This is a sad and chilling rendition of the spy game and a far more profound film than even the best of Bond, though I very much enjoy that series as light entertainment. This is the spy game as seen in a dark mirror. I highly recommend this film for its taut script, fine direction, and brilliant performance by Burton. The running time is 112 minutes. The widescreen DVD from Paramount has no extras, but offers English 5.1 Surround Sound, English mono, or French mono, as well as optional English subtitles.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older