L'espion qui venait du froid

Back during the Cold War, people actually bought into the bleak misery that was brinkmanship & actors actually took chances, & their agents let them.

Richard Burton is Alec Laemmas, John Le Carre's reluctant spy, whose disillusionment is turned against him to save one last informant: hard to believe that Mr. Burton was then still in the throes of his public romance with Liz Taylor. Grim's the word here: from the opening Checkpoint Charlie Berlin scene to the Dutch shores to the East German countryside--the Cold War's done nobody any favors. Moreover, this harsh treatment of spies & their back-stabbing, double-dealing ways was made just after Ian Fleming's suave James Bond had become a pop movie icon (Bond's "M," Bernard Lee, as a grocer here ["T'get a proper credit, y'need a banker's reference."], gets the crap pummeled outta him by Burton).

Anyway, "Spy" is movie stripped of glamor: everyone gets usurped by people with power. Burton's Laemmas is sent to salvage the good guys' chief informant, a senior GDR official; Claire Bloom's Commie idealist Nancy is called to East Germany under the ruse of cultural exchange, to aid in the hoax. Oscar Werner is mesmerizing ("Were you present for ziss...Sanksgiving?") as the no. 2 man in the Abteilung, on the trail of no. 1, Peter van Eyck, until Laemmas shows up to thwart his plans.

If old cold warriors were only half as conniving as they appear here, whither did they go after the fall of the Soviet Union? Something to which nobody with nanogram of sense has paid much attention.

I had a relative who in the fringes of their job came into contact with people from the intelligence services.

They always said real spies were less James Bond and more Alec Leamas.

Middle aged, bitter, alone, likely to be divorced, drink too much, politically slightly left of centre.

John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is noted for maybe showing the true face of spycraft.

On the fringes it has characters like George Smiley. As it goes on, the only person in control is Control. His talk to Leamas about the dirty things the spy services have to do. It is not small talk. It is the literal truth.

Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) messes up an operation in Berlin and is recalled to Britain.

He has been given a new assignment. Leamas has to pretend to have been thrown out by the security services.

It is a ruse for Leamas to come into the attention of British communists and East German intelligence. Be seen as a potential defector.

Leamas is meant to bring down an East German high ranking intelligence officer named Mundt. Leamas finds himself deep of a complex and messy espionage game.

American director Martin Ritt seems to be at ease with such complex material. He makes sure to include a pivotal scene where an important plot point is explained. So many times, espionage films want to leave it dense.

Ritt was left wing and a victim of the McCarthyite witch hunts. Maybe that explained why he was able to identify with an outsider like Leamas and the complex manoeuvrings of the intelligence agencies.

As for Burton, he was already halfway there as the self loathing alcoholic Leamas. The rest was courtesy of a good script and his acting ability.

You can check my voting history to see how rarely I give out perfect 10s. But this film truly deserves the honor.

I hesitate to call it a spy movie because it's nothing like any spy movie I've ever seen. There are no hi tech gadgets, shoe phones and sexy Russian agents. There are no fantastic plots to recover microfilm hidden in the crown jewels. The hero doesn't even carry a gun. Instead the battle is fought with pure intelligence, political manipulation and trickery. This is what true espionage is about, the way WWII history books tell us. In the same way Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" broke the rules of the scifi stereotype, this film did the same with the spy genre.

I won't say anything about the plot except that it requires your full attention. Things are not spelled out for us, and it requires a bit of work to piece it together, but that makes the payoff all the more stunning. This movie reads as if it were a book (which may be good or bad depending on how you like your movies). But I assure you it's not boring. I found myself whispering after every scene "This is so freaking cool! How much cooler can it get?" The answer: much.

The acting is flawless. Richard Burton is perfect as the cynical, faithless enigma who hides his mission so well even we can't guess what he's up to. Claire Bloom is equally convincing as the clueless but intelligent bystander. Oskar Werner, in the greatest role I've seen him play, is both chilling and magnetic as the interrogator. Even the minor roles were expertly played.

The script is so clever I highly recommend watching the film with subtitles so that you don't miss any of the great lines and wit. It may also help you keep up with the plot which, as I said, can be tricky.

Sol Kaplan's musical score is sparse but very effective in maintaining the heavy mood. The piano pieces really make you feel the weight of the dreary, cold war era. And the lack of music during tense scenes is equally powerful.

And that brings me to my favourite part of the film: the amazing camera work, cinematography and lighting. This is one of those films that makes you realize that black&white isn't just a choice of film; it's an entire art form unto itself. Darkness and light, sharpness and haze, shadows and contrast are used to the fullest. But it's not obnoxiously done like a 2nd year film student might do. No, everything flows naturally so a layperson can enjoy the scenery just as much as a cinema geek.

And there you have it; nothing but praise from me. The only problem is that it has ruined all the other spy films and political thrillers for me.

The last reviewer wrote: Burton is cast as Alex Leamas, a nerve-dead, aged secret operative operating out of West Berlin. After a routine assignment goes awry, Leamas is sent home and out of the service. He struggles to try to live a normal, average life as a librarian's assistant, but he can't make it work for him (something that is not helped by his chronic alcoholism). This fact is made forcefully clear when he winds up beating a local grocer and is sentenced to jail time. Slowly but surely, he allows himself to be pulled back into the Cold War he operated in, not suspecting or maybe not even caring that his superiors are setting him up for a fall.

I think this is wrong. I believe the Burton character, Leamas, working with his UK spy agency, pretends to be kicked out of the spy service and acts as if he is going to seed so he can be "turned" by the enemy and complete his secret mission.

Regardless, it's a great film with a great performance by Burton as the world-weary spy who has seen it all, and Claire Bloom as the idealistic UK communist party member who has no idea how ugly it is out there.

Black and white, made in the Sixties, a spy film without gadgets - has bummer written all over it, right? Well, no. Forget all that James Bond cack and the good guys in the West vs. the evil guys in the East schlock, once you have seen The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, you feel you know the seedy world of spying inside-out. Well actually, for all I know Spy is just as much fantasy as all that ridiculous James Bond glamour. But that isn't the point. Spy is, after all, only a film, but it is a film which carries a hell of a punch. No, I really do not know whether this portrays the real world of spying, but I have strong suspicion that it does. There are no good guys and bad guys in Spy (and possibly in the real spy world), just intelligent, devious and utterly ruthless men and women who simply want to make sure that the other side doesn't get to win. That, it would seem, is the one principle dear to both sides: make sure you don't lose. In the process of not losing, people are highly expendable. Yes, I'm sure that some agents occasionally use guns and bombs to kill people, but I'm even more sure that the most effective weapon either side has is intellect. Spy is a joy. It takes a little while for the essential story to begin, but that is necessary. If you are reading this before deciding to see it, see it and stick with it. You ain't seen deviousness until you have seen the ruthless deviousness portrayed in Spy. As for the film itself - I have rather been rattling on about spying in general rather than the film - there is not a weak performance in it, and Burton is outstanding. Make time to see it if you can.