La talpa

It is rare that an adaptation of a complex novel translates well to the small screen. Often detail is eliminated for sake of time and the plot loses aspects that are key to the real story.

The team of John Le Carre and John Irvin has created what may go down as the benchmark for the Spy story mini series. In six hours of television they lay out piece by piece the background of each of the characters in a slow and gentle manner enabling the viewer to capture a sense of both the person and the time in which they are placed.

Irvin permits the story to move in a 'typical English manner', with George Smiley, the principal character almost rolling along from one event to another. Alec Guinness is outstanding in this role and it seems the it was either written with him in mind or he was born for it. I suspect the later is more likely. Smiley and his quirks are key to unravelling what is a complex plot with the usual twists and turns of they spy genre.

The casting of the rest of the players is equally superb with an ensemble performance by the who's who of the English stage. The goodies are all flawed people while the badies, many of who are within the British Secret Intelligence Service, are bad in the way that only the English can truly be to each other.

If you enjoy Le Carre and are prepared to put in 6 hours to view the entire series you you will be richly rewarded.

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.

Since I first saw Tinker Tailor in 1980 on Public Television in the USA, I have wanted to see it again and again. It remains one of the best adaptations of LeCarre, and the best mystery filmed.

Recently I was able to order the PAL version from Black Star video in the UK, and have it converted. It was a lot of money but worth every penny -- A Christmas present to myself.

Guinness gives one of his greatest performances, and the rest of the cast, especially Beryl Reid, Ian Bannen and Ian Richardson, more than hold their own against him. As another viewer said, it is a terrible shame it is not available in the US. I hope that changes some day.

I have a web site for Alec Guinness that IMdb had kindly linked to their page on him, and I plan soon to add a review there of both Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People. Bravo to all concerned for both series.

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.