10/4/09

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold



This is a good film I reviewed earlier this year. It is another film evoked by the unproduced screenplay I recently read.

As I said:

' And this is why the film is so good. It is the internal machinations, especially in the mind of Leamas, that make this film work. A lesser actor simply could not have sold the part as equivocally as Burton does: is he in the dark or not? Is he an agent on the way down (because of a failed operation) or merely playing one? The title of the film is usually thought to mean that Leamas has finally gained insight into the machinations of the Cold War, but it could also mean the man finally realizes his worth to his employers, the world, and himself. Or, more accurately, his lack of same. The cold that he hits is reality’s nor’easter. And, despite his own reputation as a brilliant roué, Burton proves he truly was a better actor. There are full scenes where the camera just resides its gaze on his mien, and the viewer is riveted. Then there are some bravura editing choices made by Ritt, where scenes end anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more before they would in conventional Hollywood films. These elisions propel the film forward, narratively, because the audience knows what will occur, and also displays an unusual confidence in the intelligence of the filmgoer.

Yet, despite al that, the film is not great. Neither in the manifest way that a 2001: A Space Odyssey nor a Tokyo Story are, nor in the more subtly great way that a similarly dark tale like The Third Man is. And, I suspect that is because the whole thrust of the tale is small. Yes, it is a Cold War thriller, but compare it to other films that came out in that era- the David Lean epics, the revolutionary pyrotechnics of a Bonnie And Clyde or The Wild Bunch, the aforementioned 2001 or even The Planet Of The Apes. I’m not stating that a film has to be write large to be great, as my prior mention of Tokyo Story proves; but it should resonate to a larger audience, in space and time. The dilemma of Alec Leamas simply does not. His world is a small one, with Byzantine codes of conduct that outsiders cannot grasp, such as his librarian lover, Nan Perry (Claire Bloom). And, while I mention her, Bloom is one of the drags on the film. It’s not so much that she badly acts her part, but that her part is simply one of the few key roles that is not well written. Yes, she’s the love interest, but, wisely, Ritt does not hammer that point home in the film with mushy love scenes. But her character always acts like a lost puppy dog- a Communist Party member that, even in the mid-60s, a decade after the revelations of Stalinist terror, is still a true believer, and utterly naïve about the Communist system’s flaws and horrors. This becomes excruciatingly painful to watch in the East German military courtroom scene where Fielder, Leamas, and British counter-spy Mundt (Peter Van Eyck), have a set-to, while Perry stands doe-eyed. It’s simply not plausible because a) of the aforementioned time frame the film takes place in, and b) Bloom’s age. She was in her mid-thirties at the time of filming, and her character looks that age, too. Were Perry a naïf coed, her reactions, character-wise, might have some credulity, but not at her age.

There are a few other areas where the film falls short, such as the injection of an Anti-Semitic subplot that, while it worked in the novel, seems just tacked on in this abridged form. As example, the Nan Perry character, in the book, is called Liz Gold, thus the whole use of that trope has a deeper resonance that is lost in the film. Also, while the courtroom and escape scenes finally reveal the real intricacies of the plot and counter-plot, they occur so quickly that most viewers will likely be lost. Whereas other moments of the film stop and allow revelation through intensity and cogitation, the film rushes through revelation to bloody denouement like a downhill locomotive, only to have its sudden end leave viewers feeling shell-shocked. This did not bother me, but it’s definitely something Ritt should have given more pause to; especially how Leamas dies, which is, given all we learn of the character, up to that point, simply implausible, and a bow to not a Hollywood ending, but a Shakespearean one which is just as contrived as a Hollywood ending would have been. Of course, that Le Carre was really a spy lends this film, and much of his work, a gloss of realism simply for not being James Bondian; how much of it was really real is not knowable. The screenplay by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper is solid, thus succeeds and fails mainly on the strength of its source. The reality, however, does not matter, for the aesthetics are what carry the film.'
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