The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) - film review

Having failed to get one of his key operatives out of East Berlin, spy administrator Alec Leamas is recalled to London and is immediately demoted to a desk job.  Tired of the routine and deeply embittered, Leamas resigns and finds work outside the secret services, as an assistant librarian.  His colleague, Nan Perry, takes a shine to him and they start to have a relationship.  Having assaulted a grocer, the former spy is arrested and serves a term in prison.  On his release, Leamas is approached by East German agents who offer him money in return for secrets.  In reality, Leamas is still working for the British secret service, his mission being to plant false information that will convince the German communists that one of their leading intelligence officers, Mundt, is a double agent.   Leamas’s fake testimony will enable Mundt to be disposed by his arch-rival, Fiedler.  But as Leamas soon discovers, even the best laid plans can go wrong...

By the mid-1960s, cinema audiences must have thought they knew all there was to know about the world of international espionage from the James Bond film: exciting adventures in exotic locations, a concoction of dry Martinis, guns, bikini-clad girls and fast cars.  Martin Ritt’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold gives a far more accurate portrayal of the life of a secret service agent, a soberingly gritty depiction that could not be further removed from the fanciful world of 007 and his colourful adversaries.

The film is notable for Richard Burton’s vivid portrayal of a world-weary agent and Martin Ritt’s masterful direction which tacitly avoids the familiar spy thriller clichés.  Burton was at the top of his game when he made this film and deserved to win the Oscar for which he was nominated but didn’t get.  His Leamas is not the smooth charmer portrayed by Sean Connery in the Bond films, but a cynical, solitary antihero who endures his squalid and precarious work as if through some sadomasochistic compulsion.   Leamas is in some sense a throwback to the old film noir hero, a twisted ruin of a man whose only satisfaction in life comes from the danger inherent in his job.  Although there is very little to like about the character, Burton succeeds in making him sympathetic.  He is ably supported by his talented co-stars, which include Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner and Peter van Eyck.  Rupert Davies plays George Smiley, the character that Alec Guinness would make his own in the BBC television adaptations of Le Carré’s novels.

This is unquestionably one of Martin Ritt’s most inspired films (although it was not a great success at the box office, presumably because audiences preferred their spy thrillers shaken, not stirred).   Ritt started out in American television, before he was blacklisted for alleged involvement in Communist activities during the McCarthy witchhunts of  the early 1950s.  He is perhaps best known for directing the gritty Paul Newman western Hud (1963).  For The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that Ritt was influenced by the film noir thrillers of the forties and fifties is apparent in the harsh lighting and unusual camera angles that he employs in certain scenes to heighten the tension.  However, Ritt uses these expressionistic touches sparingly and if anything tends to eschew stylisation for a documentary-like realism, which perfectly captures the unique atmosphere of Le Carré’s labyrinthine spy novels.   Few films have ever conveyed the shadowy world of espionage as authentically as this chilling and compelling work.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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