Criterion Confessions

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.


Martin Ritt's 1961 jazz-infused drama Paris Blues is one of those films that, once you've seen it, you're kind of shocked that people don't talk about it more. A joint vehicle for Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, Paris Blues is a Kazan-like social narrative that juxtaposes new Hollywood method with old Hollywood romanticism and somehow let's both win without compromising either.

Newman stars as Ram Bowen, a trumpet player with a moody demeanor worthy of his groaning pun of a name (say it out loud and then say, "Rimbaud"). He is the toast of Paris' side-street jazz scene, blowing nightly with his band, working alongside his cohort and musical arranger, Eddie Cook (Poitier). Eddie is practical and level-headed, a smooth balance to Ram's jagged edges. The ex-pat Americans have a good thing going in France. Ram even has a no-strings love affair with a chanteuse (Barbara Laage) who doesn't mind feeding him after gigs.


Yet, the boys have ambition, too. Ram is working on a magnum opus, his "Paris Blues," and he hopes to get some weight behind it by giving the sheet music to Wild Man Moore, a trumpeting legend who has just landed in the city as part of a European tour. Moore is played by none other than Louis Armstrong, just to give you an idea of Paris Blues' musical bonafides. The original scorce was also composed by Duke Ellington, who was nominated for an Oscar. Ritt isn't fooling around.

Yet, he's also not limiting his story--which was written by four different scribes from a novel by Harold Flender--to just difficult men in smoky bars. When Ram goes to the train station to meet Moore, he also meets a pair of young American women in town to see the sights. One white (Lillian, played by Joanne Woodward) and one black (Connie, as portrayed by Diahann Carroll). To give you an idea of how progressive Paris Blues was for the time, despite the eventual romantic pairing being just as you suspect, Ram at first flirts with Connie without race even being mentioned. (And who wouldn't. Have you ever seen Diahann Carroll?!) Lillian is more his match, however, in that she's been around the block and has an admirable patience. The single mother has dealt with her fair share of troublemakers, Ram's temperament suits her. It's going to take some effort to get him to value anyone over his music, though.


Which he sort of will come to do over the time he and Lillian spend together in Paris. For the next several days, both pairs of lovers will try to fashion their affections into some kind of common ground. Lillian sees the possibility of something more with Ram. Connie would love for Eddie to come back to the States, but he's frank about his reasons for living overseas: America is racist. She argues it's gotten better in the five years since he left; he counters that it's still not good enough.

Paris Blues is very frank about its politics, but not in a way that makes it seem like a polemic just for the sake of it. The topics broached in the narrative emerge naturally. These are things the characters would care about, they deal with life as it would genuinely affect them. For as traditionally structured as much of the writing is, Paris Blues treats all aspects of these folks' existence in the same realistic manner. It's never said, but we know that Ram and Lillian are having sex. Ram's guitar player (French cinema legend Serge Reggiani, Casque d'Or) is also a drug addict, a fact Ram confronts head on (as befitting a ram, natch). Race, sex, drugs, art--this is important stuff. Ritt manages to make all these things come off as both matter of fact and yet also important. Hell, look closely at the opening montage, you'll see a gay couple tucked away in Ram and Eddie's audience.


But forget all that. The sights! Paris Blues was actually shot on the Seine! And the music! Louis Armstrong struts into Ram's club to challenge him to the jazz equivalent of a rap battle. The only comparable jazz-scene movie of the period is Basil Dearden's All Night Long [review], released a year after Paris Blues. This flick is the real deal.

You also get an acting quartet that was at the height of their considerable powers. Apparently at one point this was going to be a movie for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. As wonderful as that is to imagine, you can't beat the chemistry of longtime paramours Newman and Woodward. They are the exception to the accepted rule that real lovers don't work on screen. Poitier and Carroll are wonderful, too--though much less showy. They are the practical couple, the counterpoint to the crazy Caucasians!

Final word: Paris Blues is a damn entertaining drama. It's romantic and toe-tapping and thought provoking. It deserves to sit next to Ritt and Newman's more famous collaborations, like Hud and The Long, Hot Summer. It's just that good.

This piece was originally written as part of a review of the boxed set The Sidney Poitier Collection back in 2009.


The cultural impact that Sidney Poitier had on cinema and society at large is indisputable. A dignified actor with a deep sense of social consciousness, he broke through racial barriers by choosing to play roles that shed the spotlight on intelligent black men--not perfect men, but men who lead their lives just like anyone else, with all the flaws that implies. Regardless of the role, Poitier refused to let any performance descend into racial clichés, and the example he created helped reshape the public perception of African Americans. It sounds frightfully simplistic, but such is the power of the moving image to shape the public perception. Roles in films like The Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones forged Poitier's early reputation in the 1950s, and highly regarded turns in films like In the Heat of the Night [review], To Sir, With Love, and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner cemented his position as a cinematic icon in the 1960s. He would eventually direct, as well, and throughout his career, he would also accept the role of social activist. Still active to this day, he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007, and he published the book Life Beyond Measure - Letters to my Great-Granddaughter in 2008.

The common theme of many of his films throughout his career remained the same: challenging the odds by trying to live life as it is meant to be. As his character says in 1957's Edge of the City, there are men and there are lower forms, and you can't let the lower forms push you into being anything less than the man that you are. (And given the respect Edge also pays to its female characters, one can assume he means "men" as in "humanity.")


Edge of the City was the directorial debut of Martin Ritt, a politically motivated artist with a passion and fury to match Poitier's. (Ritt is probably best known for Hud, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [review], and Norma Rae.) It also features John Cassavetes in the co-starring role, adding to the film's legacy as an early spotlight for maverick film artists. (Cassavetes is the prototype for the cantankerous independent American director.) The film opens with Cassavetes' character, Axel North (née Nordmann), rolling in to New York City with only a little money and a dubious recommendation in his pocket. The name he drops at the rail yard is of a man in San Francisco, but it's enough to get him a job under the crooked foreman Charlie Malick (Jack Warden). Knowing that Axel is on the lam, Malick puts the screws to him. He also doesn't like it when Axel befriends Tommy "T.T." Tyler (Poitier), the only black foreman on the yard. As the two become close, Charlie gets more upset and eventually pushes for Axel's secrets to come out.

The core of the movie, which was written by Robert Alan Aurthur (All that Jazz [review]), is less about the past Axel is running from and more about how he learns to cope in the present. Tommy serves as a role model for the younger man. He's married and has a family, and his wife is an educated woman (Ruby Dee) who introduces Axel to an equally educated and socially active love interest (Kathleen Maguire). As Axel begins to trust Charlie, he is also given more strength to stand up for himself, to accept other people as they are, and accept whatever he may have done prior to NYC as something he can change. As far as male bonding goes, it's pretty healthy stuff. Cassavetes' twitchy method acting plays well against Poitier's upright performance, and Jack Warden rounds it out with smarmy menace. The climax where the two men must finally deal with this cranky thorn in their sides is maybe a little too On the Waterfront, but the gritty honesty of the writing up until that point allows Ritt to get away with it. A lot of the movie was shot on location, and so it has an on-the-street authenticity that prefigures French verite while also showing the influence of Jules Dassin's The Naked City [review].

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2009.

Hollywood was all over Akira Kurosawa from the get-go. Not in the "We revere you so much we're going to import your movies" sense, but in the "No good idea is too good for us to think we can do better but most likely ruin" sense. Quite a few of his more famous samurai action pictures have been turned into quite a few westerns with a variety of results. Yes, it's hard to believe, but one of cinema's greatest directors was treated the way Hollywood now treats foreign horror movies: grist for the remake mill. Though I knew that a ton of different productions had ripped off the basic Rashomon concept of one story told from multiple yet conflicting points of view, I didn't know anyone had ever had the cajones to remake the 1950 classic in its entirety. Turns out there was a stage version written by Fay and Michael Kanin, and it was even filmed for television twice (including once by Sidney Lumet) before Martin Ritt decided to turn it into a full-fledged film in 1964. The Outrage placed Rashomon in a remote outpost in the post-Civil War American West, and it's a surprisingly obscure effort given that it's both Ritt's and Paul Newman's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Hud.

Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. When I worked in video retail, a customer once told me that he had a theory that the more stars there are in a movie you've never heard of, the worse that movie is likely to be. In addition to Newman, The Outrage stars Edward G. Robinson, Claire Bloom, William Shatner, and Laurence Harvey. It's not exactly a Cecil B. DeMille Greatest Show on Earth ensemble, but that's a pretty solid roster. Not exactly no-names, though not exactly A-List--just as The Outrage is not exactly awful, but not really a classic either.


The story of The Outrage pretty much follows the Kurosawa model: three men gather in a desolated area and end up discussing four different versions of one terrible story. In this case, Shatner plays a preacher who is waiting for a train at a rundown station in hopes of catching the next trip out of town, his faith in humanity shattered along with his belief in the absolute. Waiting with him is the downtrodden prospector (Howard Da Silva) who wants to convince him not to go and a conniving huckster (Robinson) in hiding lest the people he ripped off find him. The day before there had been a trial for a crime perpetrated against a traveling couple. As the verdict stands, the notorious outlaw Juan Carrasco (Newman) raped Nina Wakefield (Bloom) and murdered her husband, Colonel Wakefield (Harvey). At least, that was how Carrasco told the story, but Mrs. Wakefield had a different version and a medicine man (Paul Fix) who heard the Colonel's dying testimony delivers a third. Though Carrasco's past crimes made him an easy conviction, the truth seems lost somewhere in all the variations.

Turns out, there is a fourth version, one known only by the prospector, who as far as the court knows only found the body, but who in reality tells the preacher and the con man that he saw the whole thing from the bushes. Yet, there are reasons to doubt his version, too, as his self-serving secrecy undermines his credibility. The con man's cynical worldview may be the truest of all, that humans are suckers and liars. It makes a certain level of sense, especially when you consider that each person's scenario is more favorable to them. Each teller of the tale is a winner of sorts in their own version. Yet, that is also the most obvious interpretation, and Kurosawa's Rashomon provokes a much deeper response. Truth is not merely subjective, it is also unknowable. How each of us lives is dictated by how well we can reconcile ourselves with that principle.


Martin Ritt and the Kanins (Michael Kanin is credited with adapted screenplay) don't entirely remove the grander meaning for The Outrage, but their fourth act ends up being a rather fatal misstep that comes across as far less convincing and far more blatant than Kurosawa's Rashomon. While the first three stories, the ones told by the bandit, the wife, and the husband, are fairly accurate to the Japanese film, the prospector's version is portrayed as first a broad Southern melodrama before descending into a slapstick fist fight between Paul Newman and Laurence Harvey. The rape is suddenly treated like a punchline, and the decision to change how the Colonel dies in the prospector's story also makes it seem like a cruel joke, a misfortune perpetrated by the indifference of the universe. If the prospector's tale in the real truth, life would then be a B-movie rather than a human tragedy.

The acting is all very good up until that last story, too, with everyone playing his or her roles with the appropriate gravitas. The switch is so severe for the prospector's story, you almost have to wonder if it was all cooked up following a rather wild party and everyone was too drunk to be operating such heavy machinery. Even Shatner kept most of his hammy tendencies in check, though at times this early performance already shows signs of his trademark delivery (in terms of speaking style, he's kind of the Christopher Walken of his day). I'd actually give the top acting marks to Edward G. Robinson as the sharp-talking roadshow salesman. The veteran actor is the most comfortable up there on the screen of any of them, and his skills as a raconteur serve him well.

I'd have been curious to hear how an older Paul Newman reflected on the time he played a Mexican, with dark make-up and all (what is that? tan-face?). To his credit and the credit of his Actors Studio training, he buries himself in the part with the same amount of respect he would give any other role. Though I suppose some could grumble about his accent and gruff voice he adopts (did he study Treasure of the Sierra Madre in lieu of a dialect coach?), he largely manages to avoid racial caricature. In fact, the writing seems to be informed by an awareness of how the Mexican people might have been viewed at the time and includes allusions to racism and shows Carrasco playing at being a stereotype to lure Col. Wakefield into his trap (indeed, even relying on the white man's greed). Beyond the voice and the make-up, I don't get the sense that Newman would have played it any other way if his character were a white bandit named Carson rather than a Mexican one named Carrasco.


If there is one compelling reason to watch The Outrage, it's the sure-handed direction that Ritt displays for most of the movie, as well as the beautiful photography by James Wong Howe (The Sweet Smell of Success). From the rainy railway station that provides the story frame, the waiting men looking like an early test version of the trio at the station at the start of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, to the open desert and the way the people crowd into the town square to witness Carrasco's trial, Ritt and Howe use the wide open spaces of the West to show how remote this little pocket is, how isolated the pioneer is from polite society. They capture every gorgeous detail, every cactus and every raindrop, using the Panavision process to its full limits. In contrast, the little oasis where the crime goes down is softly lit, like a pocket dimension within the greater frontier. The Outrage is a gorgeous movie, tightly edited by Frank Santillo (who also worked with Sam Peckinpah on his more thoughtful movies), an expertly constructed movie from start to finish.

But a technical triumph is still only as big a victory as the script allows, and alas, there is no way around the pitfalls of The Outrage. While the first sixty minutes are very good, if a bit unnecessary given the existence of the Kurosawa original, the final thirty are a terrible blunder. There is little reason to watch a flawed version of Rashomon when you can just watch Rashomon--and that you can take as the absolute truth in a world of wishy-washy opinions. Anyone who says different is either lying or wasn't really there!

Originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011:



The quality of John Huston's 1961 drama The Misfits is often eclipsed by its salacious backstory. The final completed film of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, it was written for Monroe by her then-husband Arthur Miller while they were in the grip of a divorce. Shooting was difficult, as both Marilyn and co-star Montgomery Clift suffered from various addictions and mental afflictions. Both Huston and Gable were hard drinkers themselves, but their habits were nothing compared to their younger cohorts. The Misfits even fell into hot water with the studio, who couldn't make heads or tails of the film. If not for Gable, who had final script approval, standing his ground, who knows how the movie might have ended up.

As it stands, The Misfits is a marvelous motion picture, easily one of Huston's best (not an inconsiderable boast). If it was misunderstood in its time, it's because The Misfits was a couple of years ahead of the curve. Its tale of displaced loners looking for meaning in the Nevada desert grappled with the passing of time--and not in the sense of a ticking clock, but historically. These characters represented an age that was ending, a lifestyle that was fading. It was as much a metaphor for the oncoming demise of Old Hollywood as it was the disappearance of 1950s America. The aura of freedom the characters longed for, and the artistic license that Miller and Huston were grasping at, were just around the corner. In two years, Martin Ritt's Hud would be a big hit. Maybe existential cowboys were just easier to take when they were Paul Newman, or maybe 24 months really did make that much of a difference.


The Misfits opens in Reno on the day when Roslyn (Monroe) is going to court to finalize her divorce. Back then, Reno had the easiest divorce laws in the country, and wronged spouses moved to the littlest big city temporarily to establish residency and dissolve their union. (This was perhaps most famously portrayed in Cukor's 1939 production of The Women.) Getting her single life back likely paid off in terms of alimony, but it costs an emotional price for Roslyn, as well. Now that she's alone, she doesn't know what to do with herself.

Enter a cowboy. Gay Langland (Gable) is a rootless roughneck who has a way with the ladies. In his mind, the worst thing in the world is "wages"--that is, a regular job. When Gay meets Roslyn, he's looking to bug out of town and spend some time in the wild with his pal Guido (Eli Wallach), a war veteran and pilot. Guido actually saw Roslyn first, he met her and the woman she's staying with (the great Thelma Ritter) that morning to assess the value of Roslyn's car. That Gay moves in on the curvy blonde causes Guido much consternation. Both men have refused to settle down again since their last marriage--Gay is divorced, Guido a widower--but Roslyn has a way of inspiring men to make exceptions to their principles.


The quartet heads out to Guido's house on the outskirts of town, where they get loaded and flirty. Guido may know how to dance, but Gay wins the day, and Roslyn and he start shacking up at Guido's house. This is essentially Act I. Act II is hitting the rodeo to find a third cowboy to go mustanging. That is when they pick up Perce (Clift), another drunk who rides broncos and bulls. There is some intimation that he maybe has some mental problems, too, though which symptoms are caused by the booze and which by the blows to his skull are up to interpretation. Perce and Roslyn are immediately attracted to one another. If Gay is a kind of stable father figure, then Perce is a kindred spirit, a broken creature just like her. Seeing him tossed around a rodeo ring puts Roslyn on edge. She can't stand a living thing to be hurt. Earlier in the film, she even stops Gay from killing a rabbit who is stealing the lettuce from their garden.

Act III is the mustanging. Roslyn goes with the boys, thinking that they intend to capture the wild horses for riding. This is not the case. Nevada mustangs are rounded up for dog food. Once upon a time, there were thousands of them in the mountains, now the men head out there believing they will find at least fifteen; the actual count is less than half that, calling attention to how pathetic this whole scheme really is. Roslyn, of course, is horrified, and her reaction stokes the testosterone in the group. There is much male posturing. First, it's who will abandon the deadly quest fastest in order to placate her; then, as she rejects different members of the hunting party, who is the bigger man. Gay almost literally wrestles with a horse just to prove no one can tell him what to do. In the frontier days, he might have been applauded for this macho showing off. In the context of The Misfits, you end up sad for him--even if you aren't sure which way your pity should flow. Is it because he is so out of touch with the times, or because the times are so out of touch with him?


Arthur Miller's script for The Misfits is poetic and intelligent. The playwright never condescends to these characters; on the contrary, the writing shows tremendous affection for them. It would have been easy to make them purely comical, but the humorous moments come naturally, they aren't forced or born of ridicule. (The drunk antics when they all return home after the rodeo are as hysterical as the preceding scenes are heartbreaking.) There is a layer of metafiction here that is hard to avoid: these freaks getting boozed up and tearing each other apart out in the middle of nowhere really were a bunch of freaks in real life. The doomed history that follows The Misfits around--Gable died mere days after shooting was completed, Monroe followed within a year, and Clift apparently had his heart attack not long after refusing to watch the film on television in 1966--becomes part and parcel with the narrative. These were cinematic icons whose time was about to pass, working in a genre that had also seen better days. It's possible this is the first revisionist western, leading to the reassessment of the cowboy mythology that would redefine the genre over the next couple of decades. It's a safe bet that Peter Bogdanovich saw The Misfits before he started making The Last Picture Show [review]. John Huston's pioneering cinema style is all over that later film. Huston shoots in the thick of the action; wherever the dust is getting kicked up, he goes. Russell Metty's black-and-white photography is beautiful and gritty, capturing the open spaces of the desert plains and contrasting them with the cramped spaces where humans wall themselves in. The bar scene where Roslyn entertains the cowboys in inadvertent ways while playing with the paddle and ball is marvelously orchestrated; the men are climbing on top of one another, and the camera jockies for such positions, as well.


Just as it's easy to forget the excellence of the scripted drama under the scandal of the off-screen drama, it's also easy to forget that these actors became stars for a reason. The acting here is exceptional, with Marilyn Monroe turning in one of her finest performances as the bruised beauty Roslyn. There is a wonderful scene in The Misfits when Gay comments on how sad Roslyn is, and she is shocked, most men always tell her how happy she seems. He replies, "That's because you make a man feel happy." This one exchange could sum up the whole of Monroe's career, and to her credit, she brings this schism to life in her performance as Roslyn. She creates a complete character, one whose internal sorrow keeps her from ever being subsumed by the things the men in her life project on her. She can play at being happy, but Monroe knows how to do it so that it's clear that it's just for show.


By the shooting of The Misfits, Marilyn had put in time with the Actors Studio. Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach were also purveyors of method acting, and they both bring their naturalistic style to the production. They appear to be living it, not putting it on. (Clift has obviously been living it too much; his handsome features are starting to show signs of age and vice.) Clark Gable somehow manages not to get lost in this. His performance is pure confidence. Perhaps it's the fact that Gay is meant to loom large over the other men working in his favor. He is intended to be different, a misfit amidst the misfits, and so the performance styles end up meshing within the material.

The Misfits is a heavy movie. It's a sad movie. It sets up multiple themes and contends with each, all the while giving proper showcase to the characters and their relationships. It's a movie that isn't afraid to be about something, but it never forgets to be about somebody--or a bunch of somebodies--along the way. It also doesn't skirt the surface or play with clichés; rather, Huston and Miller get right down in the human muck and root around in all the neuroses and foibles, and though they lament how their misfits are losing ground, they also show how these folks do it to themselves. The tide of history drowns those who can't adapt. The glimmer of hope here is that sometimes, when people swim for shore together, they actually find a way to stay afloat.

IN THEATRES...

* Che--less a full review, more of a brief recount of the experience and the day, including meeting Steven Soderberg.

* The Great Buck Howard loses a bravura John Malkovich performance in an overly genial script.

* I Love You, Man, a gut-busting bromance with stand-out performances by Jason Segel and Paul Rudd.

* Watchmen--as in, man, are you going to be looking at your watch. A lot.

ON DVD...

* Elegy, the recent Philip Roth adaptation with Sir Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz.

* Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, the classic cartoon gets a fishy remastering.

* L'Innocente, the final film of Luchino Visconti is a steamy winner.

* The Kaiser's Lackey, a 1950s East German satire that has lost some of its bite over the years, thought it still retains its artistic vigor.

* Paul Newman X 2: The Helen Morgan Story, a fairly average biopic about a doomed singer, and The Outrage, Martin Ritt's perplexing remake of Rashomon.

* The Robe, the overwrought, overripe religious picture is only really notable for being the first studio production released in Cinemascope.

* The Romance of Astrea & Celadon, an Eric Rohmer period piece that gets stuck up its own class.

* The Scarlett Johansson Collection, collecting three more indie-minded movies featuring the actress.

* Yentl, the Babra Streisand musical is a real eye-opener.

In addition to my Criterion reviews, here are other reviews film fans of similar tastes might find of interest from the last month:

IN THEATRES...

* Coraline, the long-awaited new effort from Nightmare Before Christmas-director Henry Selick is a pretty looking dud.

* Two Lovers, a rough and often tough-going romantic tale about the ups and downs of the heart. With Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Also, check out the reviews in the Portland International Film Festival section of my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog. I cover many foreign movies that will hopefully be coming to a theatre or DVD shelf near you very soon...or in some cases, hopefully not.

ON DVD...

* Cannery Row, a Steinbeck adaptation that falls short of the mark thanks to a strained and hokey stylistic nostalgia. With Nick Nolte and Debra Winger.

* Far from the Madding Crowd, John Schlesinger reteams with Julie Christie in an epic, romantic adaptation of Thomas Hardy.

* A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, an interesting but all too familiar coming-of-age tale that asks you to believe that Shia LaBeouf will become Robert Downey Jr.

* In the Electric Mist, Bertrand Tavernier tackles a James Lee Burke novel with mixed but mostly good results. Tommy Lee Jones stars as Burke's Detective Dave Robicheaux.

* Murnau, a collection of six of F.W. Murnau's silent films from Germany, including Nosferatu, Faust, and The Last Laugh

* Natalie Wood Signature Collection, a new boxed set that is mostly full of misses from the Warners back catalogue. It does contain the new edition of Splendor in the Grass, though.

* The Sidney Poitier Collection, three good movies, including Martin Ritt's Edge of the City with John Cassavetes and Something of Value with Rock Hudson, sit next to one clunker. Three out of four, still pretty good.

The thing that differentiates a great espionage picture from a bad or even merely good one is the same thing that drives the genre's detractors mad: the degree to which it leaves the viewer in the dark. When watching a spy movie, one should often be scratching one's head, sometimes even while exiting the movie theatre and the movie is over. Criss-crossing lies, duplicitous relationships, and a sense of futility are the spymaster's stock and trade. The Coen Bros. recently made great comedy hay out of the ridiculous obfuscation of these kinds of stories in their film Burn After Reading, keeping their hapless C.I.A. agents guessing as much as the audience--though in that case, the audience knew what the government didn't, that it all looked meaningless because it really was.

In the 1965 adaptation of the John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, everything hinges on a similar question: does it mean anything at all to be out there fighting the Cold War, or do the wheels just continually grind on? Meaning vs. meaninglessness is of the utmost importance. The lead cloak-and-dagger man of the film, British covert agent Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), is regularly asked to state his beliefs. He says he has none, be it in God or Karl Marx or Santa Claus, and the answer is always met with skepticism. One of his enemies, the Communist agent Fiedler (Jules and Jim's Oskar Werner), even goes so far as to ask how a man can sleep at night without some kind of philosophy to keep him warm.

Alec is a veteran of the Cold War, having been the long-term head of British operations in East Berlin. He's seen it all, the trading of human lives and the dogmatic adherence to rules that forbids lending a helping hand to a defector running across Checkpoint Charlie until he's already reached the safety point. It leads to a man's death and gets Alec pulled back to England. He thinks he's going to be fired, but his boss (Cyril Cusack) has a much more ironic assignment for him. He will pretend to retire instead of taking a desk job, letting his disgruntlement be known, and then pose as a defector himself. Once he has crossed to the other side, he will confess to evidence that the Brits had planted long before, implicating the #1 commie, a former Nazi named Mundt (Peter Van Eyck), as a traitor and giving Fiedler reason to make a move against him.

That is about as clear about the plot as I want to be without giving too much away. That's even more than I knew going in, and the air of confusion and mystery is created rather quickly once Alec begins his undercover work. For the beginning of it, I wasn't quite sure if he had accepted the assignment or not, and until he meets one of le Carré's most popular characters, George Smiley (this time played by Rupert Davies), his true motivations for his prior actions are left unexplained.

As are his true emotions. It's in that meeting with Smiley and their boss, the aptly named Control, that we get the sense that the young radical Alec met at the library he has been working at has actually made an impression on the heavy-drinking spy. The girl, Nan (Claire Bloom), is an idealist who thinks communism can bring peace, and her earnest commitment is laughable to an old cynic like Alec. Even so, the girl is kind to him, and when it looks like the operation to smear Mundt is going to get dangerous and pull him out of England, Alec does his best to protect her. Of course, this will also be his biggest mistake: for a man who sees no meaning in anything else, the fact that Nan now means something to him won't fail to go unnoticed.

The world of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a harsh one full of moral tundras that make the distinction between right and wrong seem childish. Even the phrase, which refers to an agent like Alec being brought back to regular life after field service, evokes a landscape that is dangerously chilly. (So much so that the characters in the film are always bundled up, no matter what country they are in.) If there is ever a case to be made for why some movies work best in black-and-white, it's a film like this, where the basic tonal values of the photography can drive home the extreme gulf between the warring points of view, not just in the use of whites and blacks but in all the grays that lay in the middle. Director Martin Ritt (Hud) and cinematographer Oswald Morris (Kubrick's Lolita) avoid the more stylized film noir aesthetic and its angular, perfectly placed shadows, instead choosing to go for a stark look borrowed from the Kitchen Sink school. The anger and the bile of working class British men is there in Alec, too. Richard Burton plays him as if he is always on the edge of an explosion, and when the flare-up does come, it's like a verbal pummeling, particularly in his climactic speech to Nan where he lays out all of the sordid details of his occupation, exposing the falsity of Control's earlier speech about what separates a noble society like England from their foes.

The true message that Alec must accept, though, is the one he delivers to Nan earlier. After discovering her anti-nuke, power-to-the-people leanings, Alec tells her an espionage parable, based on events he witnessed, where two grey trucks converged on a highway, crushing a family station wagon that was driving down the middle of the road between them. He didn't see the crash himself, he had moved on, never looking back. Though he thinks that the point of the story is that the mighty, interchangeable forces of world government always trample the innocent underfoot as they rush for power, the true message is the one that everyone else is trying to teach him: you can't stay in the middle, one must choose a side. It doesn't have to be either of the grey behemoths or even either side of the Wall they have built to separate their ideologies, it can be taking a stand against both of them in defense of the station wagon. You just have to stand for something. If you don't, you will find yourself caught in the no man's land, confused as to why the men on both sides of the divide have their guns trained on you.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.