This week’s selection I decided to watch some adaptions of John le Carré’s spy thrillers. I’ve been a fan of le Carré’s work for a long time. I like the level of cynicism portraying the spy world as a place that eats people up and chews them up. After reading him it’s impossible to take James Bond seriously
The first film on my list, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,directed by Martin Ritt, tells the story of Alec Leamas, played by Richard Burton, a British secret agent who is in charge of getting people across the Berlin Wall. After several of these people are killed he’s sent back to London where he is used in a plan to find the East German agent responsible.
The Spy Who Came Out From The Cold was first Le Carre books I’d read and while I only really got into his work later on this is a good one to introduce us to the dark world of spycraft where being a soldier in the Cold War is just a pointless job and no one is truly “good”.
This film does a pretty good job of portraying this dark worldview with Burton playing the burnt out Leamas with precision.
The second film on My list is The Little Drummer Girl directed by George Roy Hill which takes us away from the Cold War to the shadow war between the Israeli Mossad and the PLO.
Diane Keaton plays Charlie an anti-zionist actress who gets drafted by the Mossad to act as bait for a PLO bomber named Khalil. In the process, she is used, traumatized and lots of people around her die.
Despite a setting where everyone is a pawn it’s relatively optimistic by le Carré, standards.
It’s been years since I read the book and what I remember about it doesn’t go much further than I just described.
I’m afraid I really didn’t get into this one that much, even though Hill’s direction is as competent as usual, as is Keaton’s performance. For me, the most interesting part of the film was the spy craft of the Mossad team, led by a fantastic Klaus Kinski, who is handling and monitoring Charlie. I found myself fascinated by the brutal professionals, shown in every aspect of their work (regrettably I’m not using “brutal” for the sake of hyperbole as can be seen in the fate of Khalil’s younger brother who they apprehend early in the film.)
