Mac-148

The book is about shades of gray, about lost childhood, about impotent British institutions, about deception, loneliness, love, frailty and betrayal. It is about harking back to World War Two and old men looking in the mirror at themselves 20 years earlier. Or through the looking glass where everything verges on madness. The movie fails on every count. Cold and wet East Germany is dressed up as sunny California and the desperate, ill-judged and futile attempts of the spy, a complicated, working-class Pole, and his feeble, old handlers, are presented as some sort of hippie road trip for a James Dean look-alike. If ever a movie needed to stick to the text and, like "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", use the starkest and bleakest cinematography, this was it.

The first episode of the BBC series sets the tone perfectly, introducing the key players and telling us what kind of people they are, all by just having them enter a room for a meeting without saying a word. The trouble with the movie version is that we never get the chance to know the characters. They are faceless people with difficult names and we don't care which one of them is the bad guy. I have read the book at least three times, seen the TV series twice and was still totally confused by the movie. Anyone who hasn't read the book, I would suggest, doesn't stand a chance. The grimy landscape around the Hotel Islay was nicely done. But why make every scene grimy? Where was the circus? Where were the lights of Shaftsbury Avenue? Where were the green fields around Jim Prideaux's prep school? The key scene with Connie Sachs is destroyed by a totally out-of-place crudity and the climax, when the mole is revealed, is thrown away with zero drama. What was going on?

I used to watch Emmerdale Farm between shifts at the Charlie Chester Casino in Archer Street and loved it. That would be November 1976 and it starred a Scottish lad who used to be in Dr Who. My point is, anyone who watches it now, with Patrick Mower, has to read "Central Casting" by Jimmy McTee (http://stores.lulu.com/aroundthepeak), in which there is a Patrick Mower look-alike competition in Sri Lanka and he is given a chance to explain why he didn't become James Bond... Apparently he nearly made it, but lost out to Roger Moore for reasons not entirely satisfactory. But then in his CV he has Callan, which makes him a star straight away. Target I am not so sure about...