Dame, König, As, Spion

Although not as sympathetic or achingly romantic as 'The Russia House', this stunning TV adaptation is the closest the screen has gotten to the singular world of John le Carre. Very few writers actually become so synonymous with their age that we look to their works to find out what a period of history was like. When we think of the Cold War, and, most especially, the shabby bureaucracy of British espionage, it is le Carre we think of.

What le Carre shares with Graham Greene, making him a million miles from the priapic fantasies of James Bond, is in showing how the Cold War literally degraded everyone. Fils like 'Ninotchka' like to show the massive disparity between the dour, repressive, monotonous Soviet Union and the glitteringly superficial, gaily materialist West. Le Carre suggests that both sides of the Iron Curtain are merely of the same coin, at the executive level at least. You expect to see 1980 Czechoslovakia as a run-down, provincial dump; but this film's England reminded me of Svankmajer's 'Alice', as it details a society, a system, an ethic, a code grinding towards inertia, a world becoming increasingly closed in that it can only be jabbed into life by shocks of betrayal.

This England is a pure mirror image of our stereotypes of the East - a system run by chilling, amoral men with perfect manners (the most frightening thing about the narrative is that any one of the suspects could have done it, each one has so lost any kind of basic humanity, never mind idealism, that it is almost irrelevant who the traitor is) gathering together in anonymous meeting rooms, or an endless rondelay of joyless dinners; a world of cramped, impersonal decor, generally sucked in by shadows, so that we can't even be sure it's men we see, or the flickering grin of the Cheshire Cat; a world of men, where one of the three female characters is an absent joke until the last five minutes, another is tortured and murdered by her superiors, and the third is sacked for competence, reduced to scraping money from grinds, a paralysed, blubbing outcast; a drab world where all colour and life has been seeped out, or goes by unnoticed, where jokes are bitter and grim, where the (very Soviet) elevator disrepair signals a wider, fundamental malaise.

If it's fun you want, get 'You Only Live Twice' - the action here is generated from its milieu - dank, meticulous, pedantic, slow, inexorable, unsensational. This is where a 6 hour TV adaptation has the edge on a feature film - cramming a le Carre plot into the latter can make it seem rushed and exciting; this film brings out all its civil-service ingloriousness superbly (although the figure of Karla is a little too SMERSHy for my tastes).

Bill Hayden says you can tell the soul of a nation from its intelligence service, and this film, despite the go-getting yuppie 80s or the success of heritage TV ('Jewel in the Crown', 'Brideshead Revisited') is perhaps the closest representation of a kind of soul, public school, Oxbridge, Whitehall, male. In equating this world with impotence and sterility (Smiley is childless), the material errs in equating homosexuality as the ultimate, literal inversion, a closing in, of minds, spirit etc.

But the metaphor of the betrayed friendship as representative of a wider betrayal is less a corny contrivance than an indication of how fundamentally incestuous this world is. These men slipping in and out of shadows are ghosts, fighting a war that doesn't exist, nitpicking over irrelevant ideological puzzles that have lost all meaning. The 'good' guys are no better than the bad - Peter Guillam, though dogged and loyal, is little more than a thug; Ricky Tarr is new yuppie incarnate in all his cocky repulsiveness.

Smiley, marvellously essayed by Alec Guinness - more obviously sharper than in the book, Hercules cleaning out the Aegean stables - loses even the barest traces of humanity, with vast reserves of calculated sadism and bureaucratic immorality, his thick glasses seeing all the detail and none of the big picture. Smiley needs the rules of the game more than anyone; without them he is left adrift in life, and the stupendous final shot shows how deeply that defeats him.

Unusually for TV, this is a film of rare visual imagination, not in the mistakenly flashy, spuriously 'cinematic' sense beloved of ambitious tyros, but in its exploration of the medium's claustrophobia, as it traps its protagonists, in particular the way the camera's point of view chillingly suggests somebody else looking on, spying on the spies, making everything we see provisional, especially the flashbacks, which elide as much as they reveal.

There are few movies that follow the book. There is no end to the comment, "The book was so much better." There is good reason for that with some films. "The Lord of the Rings" would have been five movies if you went "by the book". Interesting and enjoyable as that might be for Tolkien fans, it was impossible for film makers. Yet, "Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy" as a movie defies that axiom.

Having read the book and seen the movie more than "several times", they still remain interconnected and indistinguishable. Yes, the book contains more detail, but may details are covered by innuendo, scene or background detail in the movie. Alec Guinness becomes Smiley so completely that his acting gives real meaning to the idea of a "character actor", even down to wiping his glasses with his tie. (you have to read the book for that one.)That is not to say, that Guinness is a robot and the movie is stiff in the name of faithfulness to the book, just the opposite.

The movie dawns the viewer in, just as the book draws in the reader, as part of the process of discovery; unraveling the mystery. As in a true "who done it" (or as one commentator put "who is it"), the viewer has no more foreknowledge than Smiley. You are introduced to all the characters, all have reasons to be the defector, all have reasons to distrust an investigation to the past, yet only one is ferreted-out.

The ending is consistent with the logic of the book and film, but, you still don't expect it. It's anti-climactic yet believable. The film, like to book, leaves one wondering how this could happen. It's thought provoking given many of the suspects comments thought-out the book/film. Both inspire thought more than resolution. The story challenges the reader/viewer to think and think well about the reasons for and purpose of spying as a whole. (The film is more English in cultural orientation, but the concept is universal, as many Americans have learned as well.)

A wonderful book transformed into visual. Great acting through-out, and you really hate all the right people....

The book by John Le Carre is intricate and multi layered and to attempt to film it was brave of the BBC. One wishes they had such courage these days, but that is another story. It is a television masterpiece.

The acting is superb. Alec Guinness was made for the part of George Smiley. From his opening scene in a London bookshop to the last shot of his face he is mesmerising. The supporting cast are the cream of British actors at the time. Some of them only have one scene like John Standing, Beryl Reid, Joss Ackland and Nigel Stock but they become real people before your eyes. Ian Bannen as Jim Prideaux is particularly moving and Hewyl Bennett gives the performance of his life.Even the actors who don't say anything look just right.

It is plainly filmed but that adds to the atmosphere. On the face of it life is normal and ordinary but beneath there is betrayal, anguish, danger and pain. The motif of Russian dolls in the opening credits is good. Dolls with faces, then one without and then an emptiness. In the end Smiley solves the mystery but the mystery of life is beyond him.

The music is great,sparse but edgy. I can watch this time and again and still get something out of it.

I hired this from our library, and was agog. I saw the latter half of Tinker in 1980 when it was televised and always wished I had seen the whole thing. Now that I am older, I have developed a real interest in espionage, and consequently, rented the video set. The cast list is simply unbelieveable. The BBC could at that time, get so many big names together to do a major series, see for example "I Claudius". Sadly, the BBC today is a shadow of its former glory, and we in the UK have to either watch the old shows and dream, or watch the BBC in the present and be so disillusioned. I prefer the former. I can't pick out any performance in particular, because everyone was marvelous. Ian Richardson, who I have always admired, from seeing him as Neuheim in "Private Schulz", is possibly the very best, if I *have* to choose. If you are in any way interested in spying, or just love a really good intelligent thriller, this is for you.

Although more schematic than its marvelous sequel, Smiley's People, and carrying less emotional weight, the BBC adaptation of John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which aired in the colonies on PBS, is still superb. As purely a suspense piece, Tinker, Tailor actually wins by a nose. Although hints are dropped throughout, and are fun to see after the initial viewing, the outcome remains up in the air until the climax. This was never quite the case in Smiley's People. There, the suspense was delivered by other means and played a lesser role in the overall plot. One requirement for really appreciating Tinker,Tailor might be having lived through at least some of the Cold War. This will allow one to read more between the lines as it is there that the story really lives and breathes. Barring that, even post-Cold War mystery fans will relate well to Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

As in Smiley's People, George Smiley, now and forever in the minds of most John Le Carre aficionados Sir Alec Guiness, is no longer with British Intelligence, termed by Le Carre `The Circus', although the plot periodically flashes back to times when he was still active. Smiley did not actually retire but was sacked from his post as head of personnel, despite his long and meritorious service. Smiley's dismissal had nothing to do with the performance of his duties but was the result of a manipulation of truly remarkable elegance, orchestrated by the Dracula of espionage, the Soviet spy master, Karla. The Soviets may have failed to produce a viable nation but could they ever spy. They punched so many holes in the American nuclear weapons program that it ended up looking like a screen door. In this vein, Le Carre fashioned an espionage that almost takes the breath away with its beauty and scope.

Spying is, apparently, like playing the stock market. To profit, one must usually be in for the long term. On the eve of WW II, while still a junior intelligence officer, Karla recruited an Oxford student who eventually became one of the half-dozen senior officers in the Cold War-era Circus. Once in place, Karla's recruit, Soviet code-name Gerald, proceeded to eat the organization alive from the inside out. The head of the Circus, known only by the designation `Control' (played wonderfully by Alexander Knox) was subjected to a particularly cruel manipulation; a ploy driven by a profoundly cynical understanding of human nature. Even more sphinx-like than Smiley himself, Control had been detecting markers of Karla's intricate scheme for months and had narrowed the mole's identity to five senior officers. To stop him, Karla fashioned a set-up in the form of an offer that Control could simply not refuse. Control's necessarily unsanctioned operation to exploit the offer failed catastrophically. Of course, it never had a chance. Control, disgraced, was forced out, taking with him Smiley who, as Control's most trusted ally, was found guilty by association and also banished.

When the dust settled, Karla had the West's two most effective intelligence services, The British, and through them, the American, working for him. Anyone who might have put the pieces together is either out or dead. The Circus is gutted but does not really know what has hit it. Control is replaced by a politcally astute but otherwise incompetent functionary whom Karla had been priming as a superstar by providing him with bogus intelligence lightly salted with just enough real value to make it stick. But when a resourceful, low-level field agent (Hywel Bennet), thought to have defected, turns up in Britain with solid evidence pointing to the existence of the mole, thereby validating Control's long-term suspicions, Smiley, the sole remanent of the old order who can be trusted, is called in to `spy on the spies'.

Here, the incomparable, dialog-driven, Le Carre plot engine begins its juggernaut roll as Smiley goes to work. Like Smiley's People, the story proceeds as a series of superbly written and acted one-on-one encounters. Included in these is a fascinating flashback in which Karla (Patrick Stewart, yes the Jean-Luc Picard guy) and Smiley actually meet. Tinker, Tailor doesn't wear its heart as much on its sleeve as does Smiley's People and has an almost clinical quality, at least on the surface. Once Smiley understands that the mole is real, he seems to know that he will eventually unmask him. Smiley simply connects the dots, moving ahead like a snowplow. The beauty resides in his meticulous process. For Smiley, the truth is absolutely out there, just out of sequence. The acting, set against the production's shadowy, gray-scale backgrounds, is flawless. The two tragic figures, Control, and the agent Jim Prideaux, the other pawn in Karla's game (Ian Bannen; his final role was the leprous Scottish nobleman in Braveheart) are especially good and provide this very cool production with its beating heart. Tinker, Tailor is not a Whodunit but rather a Whoisit; a classic mystery with the added cachet of espionage and is one of the very best things to have ever appeared on television. It's bloody good stuff, old chap, like the best single-malt you ever sipped.