★★★★
After Tinker, Tailor, I wanted to watch the 45-year-old Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I’m glad I did. It’s good.
There’s some continuity to these two Le Carre adaptations. The atmosphere and mood are similar since both have an oppressive darkness to them. While the desaturation in Tinker, Tailor sets it’s mood, a perpetual, omnipresent rain creates a feeling of bleakness in the black-and-white Spy . And there’s a tawdriness in both, too, with Alec Leamas being a drunk who makes ethnic slurs, feels sorry for himself, and works in a tedious job reshelving books. He runs up a tab he never pays at his local grocer and spends his money on alcohol, and we follow him though the unemployment line. Even his co-worker lives in a tiny apartment devoid of grace or elegance. Neither the London of the film nor its characters provide much uplift to viewers.
The storytelling here prefigures that in Tinker, Tailor, too. We don’t get a clear, straightforward story in Spy but rather have to read between the lines until the gaps are filled in. The most obvious example of this is early in the film when Control tells Alec he wants him to stay in the cold a bit longer, to remain in the Circus, solitary and disconnected from any special relationships. We soon see Alec drinking too much, looking for work, being bitter and assaulting his grocer. The film doesn’t tell us how these two situations are related until much later when we hear that Alec is trying to draw the attention of German espionage. Tinker, Tailor has similar gaps – and many more of them -- but the director of this film feels the need to fill in his 1961 audience with a few more connections. Despite Ritt’s feeling that he has to complete the story for his audience, he leaves enough jumps in the story to make the audience engage to figure out what’s happening before he ultimately give it to them as exposition.
Among the many good qualities of the film, my favorite is its bravura camera work, cinematography that the later film doesn’t match. There’s a long crane shot in the opening of Spy that hearkens back to Touch of Evil (released only three years before) as Ritt’s camera follows a car as it exits the border control at the Russian sector of Berlin and comes to the American Checkpoint Charlie. The Orson Welles reference is so explicit here that I half expected the car to explode. Another outstanding piece of camera work occurs as Alec is released from jail. The camera is inside a bus, and we see him with Nan, who the camera follows as she walks in front of the bus and runs up the side to the door and inside. And while we watch this shot, a face in the crowd stand out that we’ll soon get to know much better. It’s a camera tour-de-force.
It’s probably worth noting, too, that the gay characters come off better in the more recent Tinker, Tailor than in this film. Here, we get the impression that the man outside the prison might have been cruising to try to pick up recently-released convicts. Soon, he’s peremptorily dismissed from an important conversation and meekly, effeminately withdraws, being called queer by Alec. He couldn’t be a bigger contrast to the gay men in Tinker Tailor, who figure in the center of the plot and have well-rounded, sympathetic personalities. Forty-five years has made a big difference in the portrayal of gay characters in these Le Carre films.
I see many ways that The Spy who Came in From the Cold prefigures Tinker, Tailor, and the earlier film actually has better camera work than the later. Both, though, create an effective, dark mood and communicate a pessimism about humanity that impresses.
