April 15, 2013
A Great Cold War Movie
The movie version of John Le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold” begins at night at Checkpoint Charlie and ends, one hundred and
ten bitter moments later, at the Wall dividing East and West. The movie
was actually shot on sets in Ireland and England, but that hardly
matters. We are in the realm of higher illusions here. The Berlin
created by the director Martin Ritt and the cinematographer Oswald
Morris had shiny, wet streets and cement block buildings, an image of
blight whose foul darkness is interrupted solely (or so it seems) by
annihilating spotlights. The look of “Spy” could not be bleaker—or more
satisfying as a poetic rendering of time and place, complete with
cigarettes and whiskey. Especially whiskey. Some of the strongest
passages of dialogue in “Spy” feel like drink-driven attempts to make
something lucid or funny out of an irredeemably miserable perception of
life.
Berlin, in the early sixties, was the epicenter
of the Cold War in all its self-cancelling fury, its busy-beaver
activity of redundant murderous errands and symbolic occasions. I
thought about “Spy” when I read, in last week’s magazine, John Le
Carré’s reminiscence (“The Spy Who Liked Me”)
of the making of the film. Seeing the picture again after reading le
Carré’s piece was like entering a physical and spiritual atmosphere that
was once very powerful but now has shifted from the dangerous to the
aesthetically and morally sinister, from reality to art. The distance is
reassuring, but the experience remains no less overwhelming.
The messy and difficult shoot that Le Carré writes about—a director in political turmoil, an uncertain, alcoholic star (Richard Burton), with his bejeweled and tempestuous wife (Elizabeth Taylor)—certainly isn’t visible on the screen. The movie, shot in 1965, is all of a piece. If anything, the discontents of director and star created its uniquely acrid flavor. According to Le Carré, Ritt, a leftist early in life, was still very sore about his experience of the blacklist in the early fifties. By 1965, he was disgusted with both Communism and with over-eager anti-Communism; he was obsessed with the betrayals of former colleagues who had not stood up for those in show business who were hounded by the McCarthyites. He was angry and divided, like many former leftists in the fifties and sixties. As for Burton, he was furious with himself for squandering his talent in often ridiculous, well-paying movies—and perhaps for squandering his affections on Elizabeth Taylor, too, though le Carré doesn’t say so. Burton, as his recently published diaries reveal, was a perceptive man, well-read, interested in many things, generous at times but subject to rancorous tirades, a heavy drinker who thought himself too good for what he was doing but not strong enough to stop doing it.
All of this unease definitely plays into “Spy,” whose outraged heart is alive to every nuance of humiliation and betrayal. Burton’s character, Alec Leamas, the disgraced Berlin station chief for M.I.6, agrees to participate in a complicated British plan to discredit the head of East German Intelligence, one Hans Dieter Mundt (Peter Van Eyck), who has murdered a number of British agents. Leamas, “discharged” from the secret service, falls apart in London, drinks constantly, blows a job at a tiny library, slugs a grocer. When he comes out of jail, he is approached by a low-level Soviet agent—a Brit—who passes him on to his superior, and so on, moving up the ladder, until Leamas has made a deal to tell what he knows to the Abteilung (East German Intelligence) for money. In East German hands, he is a defector who casually drops hints about Mundt’s suspicious behavior. The scheme to annihilate the Abteiling chief depends on Leamas’s ability to arouse the jealousy of Mundt’s ambitious deputy, Fiedler, an idealistic Jewish Communist. But I will give away no more of the story, which grows increasingly complicated, insinuating, wicked, and dismaying. Surely it is one of the great plots (in both senses) of all time.
When the novel was published in 1963, it excited a certain dismay in Britain and the United States, for here was Western intelligence acting with the same deviousness as the enemy—if anything with greater deviousness. The assumed polarities of good (West) and evil (East) were knocked askew, the heroic romance of spying ended. Spying had become a vicious but perhaps irrelevant game of blow and counter-blow, an exercise for its own sake, independent of causes, “values,” or ideals. Leamas no longer believes in what he’s doing, but he plays his part brilliantly. He may be the most self-disgusted hero in movie history.
Le Carré relates that he was afraid that Burton would lavish his sonorous and musical baritone upon very downbeat material, and Martin Ritt feared that indulgence, too, but Burton, in some of the greatest acting of his career, concentrates his voice into a quiet rasp. When Leamas is angry, Burton smiles, curls his lips slightly, and drops down an octave without any increase in volume. His sarcasm, most of it self-lacerating, is almost frightening in its distilled anguish. In London, as he’s falling apart, Leamas allows himself to be taken care of by a pretty Communist Party member, Nan (Claire Bloom), and Burton looks at Bloom with sardonic near-contempt; his Leamas is touched by her solicitude, but he’s appalled by her ignorance of Communism, which she associates with a better world, the improvement of the masses. She doesn’t know that he’s a British agent putting on a performance as a derelict; she responds to him as a suffering man. But the irony which makes the movie so powerful is that he truly is a suffering man who has lost all illusions.
Claire Bloom simultaneously suggests intellectual foolishness and emotional wisdom. Her idealism, however inane, links up with the much more knowing dedication of the Communist Fiedler (Oskar Werner, in the performance of a lifetime), with whom Leamas has a series of dialogues in the East German intelligence compound and high in the mountains nearby (the German geography is a little vague). At last, Burton lets his voice out: playing his role as inadvertent betrayer of Mundt, he turns ferocious, telling Fiedler he’s nuts to suspect Mundt of bad conduct. There follows Le Carré’s double reverse—I shall not reveal it—a series of developments that are still shocking today. In the end, the two Communists—Nan and Fiedler—are dupes of the East’s cynicism, and Leamas is a dupe of Western expediency. In “Spy,” the defeated illusions of Communism are vanquished by the vaunting powers of the West, an early prescient hint of the coming triumph (the same is even more centrally true of Le Carré’s later “Smiley’s People”). The victory is won, however, at an unacceptable cost. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is bathed in grief. Le Carré’s article fills in the cause of that grief’s special intensity: Ritt’s sense of betrayal as the norm of political life and all of Burton’s troubled relations to himself got poured into one of the most truthful and emotionally resonant movies made in the entire Cold War period.
The messy and difficult shoot that Le Carré writes about—a director in political turmoil, an uncertain, alcoholic star (Richard Burton), with his bejeweled and tempestuous wife (Elizabeth Taylor)—certainly isn’t visible on the screen. The movie, shot in 1965, is all of a piece. If anything, the discontents of director and star created its uniquely acrid flavor. According to Le Carré, Ritt, a leftist early in life, was still very sore about his experience of the blacklist in the early fifties. By 1965, he was disgusted with both Communism and with over-eager anti-Communism; he was obsessed with the betrayals of former colleagues who had not stood up for those in show business who were hounded by the McCarthyites. He was angry and divided, like many former leftists in the fifties and sixties. As for Burton, he was furious with himself for squandering his talent in often ridiculous, well-paying movies—and perhaps for squandering his affections on Elizabeth Taylor, too, though le Carré doesn’t say so. Burton, as his recently published diaries reveal, was a perceptive man, well-read, interested in many things, generous at times but subject to rancorous tirades, a heavy drinker who thought himself too good for what he was doing but not strong enough to stop doing it.
All of this unease definitely plays into “Spy,” whose outraged heart is alive to every nuance of humiliation and betrayal. Burton’s character, Alec Leamas, the disgraced Berlin station chief for M.I.6, agrees to participate in a complicated British plan to discredit the head of East German Intelligence, one Hans Dieter Mundt (Peter Van Eyck), who has murdered a number of British agents. Leamas, “discharged” from the secret service, falls apart in London, drinks constantly, blows a job at a tiny library, slugs a grocer. When he comes out of jail, he is approached by a low-level Soviet agent—a Brit—who passes him on to his superior, and so on, moving up the ladder, until Leamas has made a deal to tell what he knows to the Abteilung (East German Intelligence) for money. In East German hands, he is a defector who casually drops hints about Mundt’s suspicious behavior. The scheme to annihilate the Abteiling chief depends on Leamas’s ability to arouse the jealousy of Mundt’s ambitious deputy, Fiedler, an idealistic Jewish Communist. But I will give away no more of the story, which grows increasingly complicated, insinuating, wicked, and dismaying. Surely it is one of the great plots (in both senses) of all time.
When the novel was published in 1963, it excited a certain dismay in Britain and the United States, for here was Western intelligence acting with the same deviousness as the enemy—if anything with greater deviousness. The assumed polarities of good (West) and evil (East) were knocked askew, the heroic romance of spying ended. Spying had become a vicious but perhaps irrelevant game of blow and counter-blow, an exercise for its own sake, independent of causes, “values,” or ideals. Leamas no longer believes in what he’s doing, but he plays his part brilliantly. He may be the most self-disgusted hero in movie history.
Le Carré relates that he was afraid that Burton would lavish his sonorous and musical baritone upon very downbeat material, and Martin Ritt feared that indulgence, too, but Burton, in some of the greatest acting of his career, concentrates his voice into a quiet rasp. When Leamas is angry, Burton smiles, curls his lips slightly, and drops down an octave without any increase in volume. His sarcasm, most of it self-lacerating, is almost frightening in its distilled anguish. In London, as he’s falling apart, Leamas allows himself to be taken care of by a pretty Communist Party member, Nan (Claire Bloom), and Burton looks at Bloom with sardonic near-contempt; his Leamas is touched by her solicitude, but he’s appalled by her ignorance of Communism, which she associates with a better world, the improvement of the masses. She doesn’t know that he’s a British agent putting on a performance as a derelict; she responds to him as a suffering man. But the irony which makes the movie so powerful is that he truly is a suffering man who has lost all illusions.
Claire Bloom simultaneously suggests intellectual foolishness and emotional wisdom. Her idealism, however inane, links up with the much more knowing dedication of the Communist Fiedler (Oskar Werner, in the performance of a lifetime), with whom Leamas has a series of dialogues in the East German intelligence compound and high in the mountains nearby (the German geography is a little vague). At last, Burton lets his voice out: playing his role as inadvertent betrayer of Mundt, he turns ferocious, telling Fiedler he’s nuts to suspect Mundt of bad conduct. There follows Le Carré’s double reverse—I shall not reveal it—a series of developments that are still shocking today. In the end, the two Communists—Nan and Fiedler—are dupes of the East’s cynicism, and Leamas is a dupe of Western expediency. In “Spy,” the defeated illusions of Communism are vanquished by the vaunting powers of the West, an early prescient hint of the coming triumph (the same is even more centrally true of Le Carré’s later “Smiley’s People”). The victory is won, however, at an unacceptable cost. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is bathed in grief. Le Carré’s article fills in the cause of that grief’s special intensity: Ritt’s sense of betrayal as the norm of political life and all of Burton’s troubled relations to himself got poured into one of the most truthful and emotionally resonant movies made in the entire Cold War period.