{"id":15669,"date":"2021-01-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15669"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:21","slug":"a-bunch-of-seedy-squalid-bastards-playing-cowboys-and-indians-the-essential-spy-cinema-of-john-le-carre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/a-bunch-of-seedy-squalid-bastards-playing-cowboys-and-indians-the-essential-spy-cinema-of-john-le-carre\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bunch of Seedy, Squalid Bastards Playing Cowboys and Indians: The Essential Spy Cinema of John le Carr\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just prior to the grim conclusion of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em>, a dark story of espionage set along both sides of the Berlin Wall during the height of the Cold War, embittered secret agent Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) viciously breaks down the foul nature of his work to the woman he loves, and who he has just unwittingly betrayed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat the hell do you think spies are?\u201d he asks, his voice dripping with venomous self-recrimination. \u201cMoral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They\u2019re not. They\u2019re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me. Little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Bond, this ain\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather, it is John le Carr\u00e9, one of greatest writers England has produced over the last century and the greatest writer of spy fiction bar none. Le Carr\u00e9, born David Cornwell in 1931 and who died this past December, wrote and published 25 novels over the course of his career, most set in or around the world British intelligence (the \u201cCircus\u201d, as it is referred to throughout many of his stories). Like fellow spy novelist Ian Fleming, whose popular Bond stories and novels preceded le Carr\u00e9\u2019s work by about a decade, le Carr\u00e9 took inspiration from his own career in espionage, having worked for both MI5 and MI6 until his identity was compromised by the infamous KGB mole Kim Philby<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But unlike Fleming, whose romantic adventure fantasies presented espionage as an exotic and heroic (if amoral) undertaking, le Carr\u00e9\u2019s exquisitely detailed, highly complex existentialist dramas showed spycraft for what it really was: a grim, pitiless and self-perpetuating bureaucracy operating solely on the principle that the ends justify the means. His is not a world of gadgets, girls and gunplay, but an ashen moral no man\u2019s land where the name of the game is betrayal\u2014not just the dramatic double crosses of moles and turncoats, but the small betrayals we are all capable of making in our weakest, most human moments. As one character says in his novel The Looking Glass War<\/em> (1965), \u201cLove is\u2026whatever you can still betray.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is hardly a concept that had movie producers salivating, but, as with the literary industry at the time, the success of James Bond (whom le Carr\u00e9 would later call an \u201cinternational gangster\u201d, \u201cultimate prostitute\u201d, and \u201cideal defector\u201d) created a counter-market for le Carr\u00e9\u2019s more grounded and intellectually richer stories about espionage. Over his lifetime, he would see a number of his books adapted for film and television, four of which\u2014The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em> (1964), The Tailor of Panama<\/em> (2001), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em> (2011) and A Most Wanted Man<\/em> (2014)\u2014comprise a subtle but fierce counterbalance to the militaristic<\/a> and Manichean fantasy of espionage pervaded by Hollywood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The very first adaptation of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s work, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,<\/em> remains arguably the best. Inarguably, it\u2019s a hard masterpiece, a perfect film based on a perfect novel (le Carr\u00e9\u2019s third, and the one that would bring him international acclaim). Directed by Martin Ritt, the story tells of a British MI6 operator stationed in Berlin who, following the execution of his top agents by his East German rival, pretends to defect in order to frame his enemy. Over the course of the quiet, haunting film (Oswald Morris\u2019s black-and-white cinematography reflects the hero\u2019s arc by emphasizing the grey in between), Leamas discovers he is but a sacrificial pawn in a different game altogether, leading to one of the great gut-punches in all of cinema. Not content to merely devastate the viewer emotionally, it\u2019s the rare ending capable of making one seriously question their larger worldview. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following year would see the release of The Deadly Affair<\/em>, an adaptation of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s debut novel, Call for the Dead<\/em> (1961). Using the backdrop of espionage to tell a more traditional murder mystery, that novel introduced le Carr\u00e9\u2019s greatest and most enduring character, the unassuming but brilliant spymaster George Smiley  \u2013 although, as played by James Mason, the character (like the story\u2019s title) gets a name change, the result of rights issues stemming from the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em> (which features Smiley in a small but pivotal role). As directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, it makes for a good movie, although nowhere near the level of his best work or, for that matter, Ritt\u2019s film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of the next 15 years only three of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s novels would receive the big screen treatment\u20141970\u2019s The Looking Glass War<\/em>, 1984\u2019s The Little Drummer Girl <\/em>and 1990\u2019s The Russia House<\/em>\u2014all of which were quickly forgotten even as the BBC adaptations of his masterful bestsellers Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em> and Smiley\u2019s People<\/em> (which aired in 1979 and 1982, respectively), made for instant classics of the form. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of those three feature adaptations, The Russia House<\/em> is the most interesting, if only because it stars the man most responsible for turning James Bond a pop culture icon: Sean Connery. However, while he gives a decent performance in the film, it\u2019s a pretty standard romantic hero role. That would not be the case with the next le Carr\u00e9 adaptation, which used a different Bond actor to much better purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Directed by the great John Boorman and featuring le Carr\u00e9 on co-scripting duties, The Tailor of Panama<\/em> is an updated spin on Graham Greene\u2019s 1958 espionage novel (and it\u2019s subsequent 1959 film adaptation), Our Man in Havana<\/em>, centered around the historic transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to its home country at the turn of this century. Amidst the global power imbalance created by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the previous decade, a resentful cold warrior (Pierce Brosnan, gleefully cutting loose as an seductively corrupt sociopath) makes the jump from spy to mercenary, manipulating his British bosses, as well as their American masters at the Pentagon, into staging a coup d’etat against the Panamanian government nation by using totally fabricated information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Boorman\u2019s film is broader in its tone than most le Carr\u00e9 adaptations\u2014starting out as a slightly sleazy slice of South American neo-noir, it eventually takes a sharp turn into Dr. Strangelove<\/em> territory\u2014and it never quite coalesces. However, it remains one the most disturbingly prescient films of its time in how it mirrors the events of a few years later, when the United States would attempt to justify its disastrous invasion of Iraq on faulty intel. Ever the foreign policy expert, le Carr\u00e9 correctly read the tea leaves at the end of the Cold War, and he foresaw how the West\u2019s search for a convenient new enemy against which it could justify the continued expansion of its military powers would lead to a doctrine of preemptive war. That this destructive foray is set into motion by 007 himself\u2014The Tailor of Panama<\/em> was released the year between Brosnan\u2019s final two Bond entries\u2014gives the film an extra-rich pungency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next two decades, Le Carr\u00e9 become an ferocious critic of the Iraq war and the War on Terror, pushing that subject to fore of many of his novels, including The Constant Gardener,<\/em> a romantic political thriller whose 2005 adaptation stands as the most commercially successful adaptation (as well as the biggest awards magnet) of his work to date. However, the film that followed it six years later, Tomas Alfredson\u2019s feature-length version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em>, falls just below it in both categories, even as it wholly eclipses it on an artistic level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alfredson had a truly daunting task adapting le Carr\u00e9\u2019s most famous (and many would argue, best) novel into a 2-hour film, not only because its story\u2014about George Smiley\u2019s hunt to find a KGB mole stationed in the upper echelons of The Circus\u2014is so intentionally complex, but because the original BBC miniseries, which starred a magnificent Alec Guinness as Smiley, remains so beloved in the U.K. The fact that Alfredson\u2019s moody, enthralling thriller not only lives up to that version, as well as the original source material\u2014in le Carre\u2019s words, replacinging, by necessity, a romantic nostalgia for the \u201cfading British establishment\u201d with a unsentimental, \u201cgrittier and crueller\u201d sense of retrospection\u2014puts it in the running not only for best le Carr\u00e9 adaptation, but best film of its decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the film\u2019s success rests on the shoulders of its star, Gary Oldman, who had the equally unenviable task of stepping into Guinness\u2019s shoes\u2014especially since, on paper, he seems all wrong for the role, with Smiley being described in the books as short, fat, shy and badly dressed (as if that wasn\u2019t enough to stand him as the antithesis to James Bond, his other defining quality is being a hopeless cuckold). One of the great chameleon actors of our time, Oldman could have made the physical transformation easily enough, but his usual high wire-energy seemed to run entirely counter to the character\u2019s stoicism and shyness (an early novel describes Smiley as \u201cpossessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.\u201d). Remarkably, Oldman discards any attempt to replicate the character\u2019s well-known physical attributes, giving instead a remarkably restrained, mostly internal performance, one that, like the film itself, contains a new, more dangerous edge. \u201cOldman\u2019s Smiley,\u201d le Carre remarked, \u201cis a man waiting patiently to explode.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The same can be said of Philip Seymour Hoffman\u2019s late turn in Anton Corbijn\u2019s adaptation of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s blisteringly angry and mournful 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man<\/em>. Released shortly after the actor\u2019s tragic passing, the film follows a burnt-out German intelligence officer stationed in Hamburg as he attempts to entrap a prominent Al Qaeda money launderer and turn him into an asset. To do this, he forcefully enlists the help of an idealistic immigration lawyer (Rachel McAdams), a morally stricken banker (Willem Dafoe) and a suspicious but innocent Muslim refugee (Grigoriy Dobrygin), all while trying to hold off his bosses\u2014and, of course, the Americans who are truly calling the shots\u2014from simply liquidating their targets in the name of expediency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the heart of the film is a blistering repudiation not only of the West\u2019s brutal, extralegal, and ineffective anti-terror policies, but its entire post-9\/11 moral philosophy. Combined with an emotionally annihilating ending, Corbijn\u2019s film stands as a true spiritual successor to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em>, as well as the best movie explicitly about the War on Terror to date. Even as the likes of the Jason Bourne franchise and Daniel Craig\u2019s Bond run took on darker shadings in order to reflect a certain real-world moral ambiguity, they play like the campiest of Moore-era Bond when held up against any of these le Carr\u00e9 adaptations, all of which put the militaristic fantasy at the heart of other spy films in sharp relief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we now prepare to enter a post-Trump, post-Brexit landscape, one in which authoritarian regimes the world over are enjoying a new prominence and where the surveillance state has become embedded in every facet of modern life (le Carr\u00e9 spoke and wrote about all of this, in detail, during his final years), le Carre\u2019s coldly furious vision is more essential than ever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or put another way, James Bond and all the other superspies need to bring their asses in from the cold. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The British novelist, who died late last year, leaves a legacy of film adaptations that jettison the girls and gizmos of Bond in favor of complex characterizations and world-weary cynicism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":15673,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-15669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22619,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15669\/revisions\/22619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}