Martin Ritt (1965)
I read John le Carré’s book, published in 1963, during my term abroad in France in 1978. The blurb on the back included Graham Greene’s judgment, ‘The best spy story I have ever read’, for which I’ve always been grateful. I decided that, if this was the best, life was too short to read any more spy stories. (I did actually make a start on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a year or so later, but soon found it unreadable.) Near the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the eponymous agent, Alec Leamas, makes a key speech to Nan Perry[1], the girl who loves him (and whom, I suppose, Leamas loves back – as much as he can). Nan is (or starts off as) an ardent Communist. Inveighing against the morally bankrupt world of Cold War espionage, Leamas is scathing about his line of work – ‘What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?’[2] he asks derisively, before telling Nan what grubby small fry he and all his kind really are. This self-deprecating quality isn’t shared, however, by Leamas’s creator. Le Carré’s work is tedious because of his god-awful moral solemnity and because what he has to say is windy and obvious – the stuff about the traumatising effects of loss of (the British) empire in Tinker Tailor, for example. Still, the BBC’s highly successful dramatisation of that book in 1979 was highly enjoyable too – so it wasn’t the case that I’d deliberately avoided the screen version of The Spy in the thirty years since I read it. Sally doesn’t believe me but I was prepared to think well of it.
The well-known opening sequence takes place at the Berlin Wall and Martin Ritt quickly establishes the film’s moral universe (which ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ pretty well epitomises anyway). There’s Sol Kaplan’s spare, melancholic, slightly self-important music. There are Oswald Morris’s beautifully lit black-and-white images, which do so much throughout to contribute to the bleakness. And, once he turns towards the camera (we see the back of his head while he speaks his first few lines), there’s Richard Burton’s ravaged and unsmiling – and, as Sally noticed, mysteriously unblinking – face. Once the scene is set, however, it’s set in stone: the film is monochrome in more ways than one. Leamas is utterly disillusioned from the word go. The only way he can develop as a character in the course of the picture is to be un-disillusioned (clearly a non-starter) or to die. How much you get out of The Spy depends on your appetite for and ability to understand the machinery of the plot, and I’m close to being a lost cause on both counts. I could never get to grips with what was going on nor, quite soon, did I want to. (I remembered nothing from the book except, as soon as she appeared in the film, that the girlfriend was shot dead at the end. I’d forgotten even that Leamas was too – perhaps because his existence already seems so much a living death.)
It hadn’t occurred to me before that the deglamorised secret agent is a close relation of the private eye. Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean’ could apply to Alec Leamas, and not just because of his mac. Leamas may have a drink problem and be prone to violent outbursts but the implication is that these express a self-loathing caused by the job he does – and by a capacity, which indicates his moral superiority to others in the same business, to rail against the spying game as symptomatic of a bloody awful world. And the Cold War specifics of The Spy make this now seem a vanished world too – as much a part of the past (and as mythic) as the private detective classics of the 1940s.
Did people in the mid-1960s take this film as seriously as its tone – bitterly reverent – suggests it should be taken? I’d guess yes and no. The political context of the story was, of course, taken extremely seriously: the threat of nuclear war was oppressively real and the defection of spies one of the emblems of East-West tensions. But a spy film didn’t need itself to reflect that angst in order to capitalise on it. The James Bond series is the most obvious evidence of that but it was interesting to see The Spy only a few weeks after North by Northwest, which was made six years earlier. The Cold War is part of the texture of Hitchcock’s film yet he and Ernest Lehman turn the espionage story into a jeu d’esprit. The similarities and differences between the two films are equally striking. Their who’s-fooling-who complications turn the plot of both into something virtually abstract: in North by Northwest this appears deliberate and is amusing; in The Spy it seems unintended and rather ridiculous. Although what befalls Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest isn’t remotely credible and you know he’ll come out on top eventually, you keep rooting for him – it matters emotionally whether he survives the crop-dusting plane, that he (with Eva Marie Saint) doesn’t fall from Mount Rushmore. Richard Burton’s Leamas is meant to be grittily believable and engaged in matters of life and death that are only too real – yet you couldn’t care less about him (or Claire Bloom as Nan).
That said, Burton is very well cast as the protagonist of a story involving a rich impasto of duplicity and so much talk. (The talk includes loads of information, as well as the occasional spasms of purple prose invective: the screenplay is by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper but I’m more than willing to believe they’re reproducing le Carré.) Burton’s vocal skills allow him to make everything sound apparently meaningful; his deeply jaded spirit makes you doubt whether he means a word that he says. The film would be pretty negligible without his presence and without Oskar Werner, wearing a very weird shiny cap and entertainingly theatrical as someone in the East German secret service (I think). The exchanges between these two have a bit of zing, although you feel it’s the actors, rather than the men they’re playing, who are sparring. The most inadvertently funny sequence, even though it goes on for ages, features an East German tribunal, chaired by Beatrix Lehmann (flanked by Steve Plytas and David Bauer). My favourite bit in the whole picture was when Lehmann asked the defence lawyer (George Voskovec) if he wanted to put any questions to Leamas and he smilingly replied, ‘In a moment – but first …’. You know how long a moment this is going to be. The acting all round in this scene is comically hammy.
Others involved in the continental action, and joining in with the overplaying, include Sam Wanamaker and Peter van Eyck (the intelligence officer whose allegiance is being investigated by the tribunal). Back home in London, there’s Cyril Cusack (good as usual, as ‘Control’), Bernard Lee (M in the Bond films of the period and therefore amusingly cast as a shopkeeper here), Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy. George Smiley is played by Rupert Davies, whom British TV audiences of the time knew as Inspector Maigret. Leamas first gets to know Nan at the library of the Society for Psychical Research where she works (as does Leamas briefly). This is run by a dragonish spinster (Anne Blake). There are some obvious scornful jokes about her and the stock on the library shelves but settings like this and the grocer’s shop have a relatively unstressed sense of time and place. They’ve stayed in my mind more clearly than the picture’s more dramatically charged locations.
13 August 2009
[1] According to Wikipedia, the girl’s name in the book, Liz Gold, was changed ‘because the producers were worried about out-of-context quotes of [Richard] Burton from the film being used in reference to his real-life wife’.
[2] This is the line in the book; it may have been slightly different in the film but the message is the same.
