| The Spy Who Came In from the Cold | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster byHoward Terpning | |
| Directed by | Martin Ritt |
| Screenplay by | |
| Based on | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 novel) byJohn le Carré |
| Produced by | Martin Ritt |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Oswald Morris |
| Edited by | Anthony Harvey |
| Music by | Sol Kaplan |
Production company | Salem Films Ltd.[1] |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release dates |
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Running time | 112 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom[1] |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $7,600,000 |
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is a 1965 Britishspy film directed and produced byMartin Ritt, adapted byPaul Dehn andGuy Trosper from the1963 novel byJohn le Carré.[2] It starsRichard Burton,Claire Bloom, andOskar Werner, and featuresSam Wanamaker,Cyril Cusack,Rupert Davies,George Voskovec, andPeter van Eyck in supporting roles.
The film depicts BritishMI6 agent Alec Leamas' (Burton) mission as a fauxdefector who is given the task of sowing damaging disinformation about a powerfulEast German intelligence officer (Werner). As part of a charade, Leamas is apparently dismissed from the British secret intelligence service and becomes an embittered alcoholic. He also strikes up a relationship with Nan Perry (Bloom), a British communist. He is soon approached by East German agents in Britain, and he allows himself to be recruited and taken to continental Europe to sell his secrets for money. The plots of the rival spy agencies unfold, and prove more complicated than Leamas expected.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was a box-office success, receiving positive reviews and several awards, including fourBAFTA Awards forBest British Film,Best Actor (for Burton),Best Cinematography, andBest Production Design. For their performances, Burton was also nominated for theAcademy Award for Best Actor while Werner won theGolden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film was named one of the top ten films of 1965 by theNational Board of Review in the United States.[3]
TheWest Berlin office ofMI6, under station chief Alec Leamas, has suffered from reduced effectiveness. He is recalled toLondon shortly after the death of one of his operatives and is seemingly drummed out of the agency. In reality, a carefully staged transformation of Leamas has been arranged by Control, the agency's chief. Appearing to be depressed, embittered and alcoholic, Leamas takes work as an assistant at a local library. There he begins a relationship with his colleague Nan Perry, a young and idealistic member of theBritish Communist Party. Leamas spends most of his small salary on alcohol, leaving him constantly low on funds. He drunkenly assaults a shopkeeper who refuses him credit and is briefly jailed. His predicament attracts the attention of theEast German Intelligence Service, which sees him as a potentialdefector.
Leamas is approached by a series of operatives, each one passing him up the chain of the East German intelligence service, and he expresses a willingness to sell British secrets for money. He eventually flies tothe Netherlands to meet an agent named Peters, who decides that his information is important enough to send him on toEast Germany. At a German country house, Leamas is introduced to Jens Fiedler, who becomes his main interrogator. Leamas then begins to carry out his secret mission, which is to share information that suggests a high-ranking East German intelligence officer named Mundt is a paid informant of the British. The evidence is circumstantial, and though it seems to implicate Mundt, Leamas repeatedly rejects that conclusion, claiming that an important East German official could not have been a British agent without his knowledge. However, Fiedler is able to independently confirm Leamas' information and comes to the conclusion that Mundt, his supervisor, has indeed been a secret asset of British intelligence for many years.
Mundt himself unexpectedly arrives at the compound and has both Leamas and Fiedler arrested for plotting against him. Once Fiedler explains his findings to his superiors, the tables are turned and Mundt is arrested. A secret tribunal is convened to try Mundt for espionage, with Leamas compelled to testify. Fiedler presents a strong case for Mundt being a paid double agent. However, Mundt's attorney uncovers several discrepancies in Leamas' transformation into an informant, suggesting that Leamas is a faux defector. Leamas' credibility collapses when Nan, who has been brought toEast Germany for what she thought was acultural exchange visit, is forced to testify at the tribunal and unwittingly reveals that she has been receiving payments from a British intelligence officer as Leamas had arranged. Faced with this testimony, Leamas reluctantly admits that he is indeed a British agent. Mundt is vindicated, and Fiedler is arrested as a complicit dupe.
Leamas initially believes he has failed in his mission and fears severe retribution from Mundt. However, in the middle of the night, Mundt releases Leamas and Nan from their cells and provides an escape plan for them both. Mundt explains that Leamas' real mission has succeeded; Mundt actuallyis a British agent, and Fiedler had been the target of the operation all along, as he had grown too suspicious of his supervisor. This comes as a shock to Leamas, and the complex web he has been drawn into and the risk he has been placed in by his own superiors become painfully clear. He explains the entire plot to still-idealistic Nan as they drive their borrowed car toward the border. She berates him for being involved in what amounts to the murder of Fiedler, who was only doing his job. Leamas, agitated by her naiveté, erupts in an angry, self-loathing confession:
What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're 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. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong? Yesterday I would have killed Mundt because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today. Today he is evil and my friend.
Leamas and Nan arrive at theBerlin Wall and are given instructions to climb over toWest Germany on an emergency ladder while a searchlight is intentionally turned away. Leamas is at the top of the wall pulling Nan up behind him when the searchlight suddenly shines directly on them, alarms sound, and Nan is shot dead by Mundt's operatives, silencing the only civilian witness to the operation. Leamas freezes in shock and horror, and is urged by agents on both sides to return to the West. Instead, he begins to climb down towards Nan's body on the eastern side of the wall, where he is also shot and killed.
The script was co-written byPaul Dehn, who had worked in theSpecial Operations Executive as an assassin duringWorld War II. The film closely follows the plot of the original source text. One exception is that the name of the principal female character in the novel, Liz Gold, is changed to Nan Perry in the film, reputedly because Martin Ritt was worried about the potential confusion in the media with Burton's wife,Elizabeth Taylor. Le Carré's preferred choice wasRita Tushingham, he initially felt Bloom was "too beautiful, classy," but later changed his mind, feeling she provided a proper foil to Burton.
Le Carré favouredTrevor Howard orPeter Finch for the role of Leamas, but they were rejected for not being enough of a box office draw;Burt Lancaster was also considered but was rejected for not being able to put on a convincing British accent.[4] Richard Burton, the eventual choice of the producers, butted heads with director Martin Ritt during the course of the production. The atmosphere on set was also tense from both the presence of Burton's wife,Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the romantic history between co-stars Burton and Bloom.[4] Burton had initially demanded Taylor play Perry, but Martin Ritt insisted on Bloom.
Several of the key cast and crew were expatriate Americans who had beenblacklisted, including director Martin Ritt, actorSam Wanamaker and composerSol Kaplan. Some of the cast and crew had previously worked on theJames Bond films, including screenwriter Paul Dehn (who wroteGoldfinger) and actorBernard Lee (the originalM).
England'sShepperton Studios andArdmore Studios in Ireland and were used for the shooting of interior scenes, with most of the external West Berlin scenes shot inDublin.[5] A recreation ofCheckpoint Charlie was constructed in Dublin'sSmithfield Plaza. The exterior scenes in the East German Alps were filmed atGarmisch-Partenkirchen inBavaria, West Germany. Scenes were filmed in theNetherlands inNoordwijk and atAmsterdam Airport Schiphol.
The remainder of the film was shot inLondon, at several locations includingHM Prison Wormwood Scrubs,Battersea Park, andTrafalgar Square. The exterior ofGeorge Smiley's safe house was located at 19Bramerton Street inChelsea.
Richard Burton demanded that Le Carré rewrite his dialogue on the set, though the effect of his changes were limited.[4] Le Carré opined in his autobiographyThe Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life that Burton had mostly wanted him there as a drinking buddy, and to mediate his clashes with Ritt.[6] "Burton was a literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share," he wrote of their relationship.[6]
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold took in $7,600,000 at the box office.[7]
The film was released byThe Criterion Collection as aRegion 1 DVD on 25 November 2008 and on Blu-ray on 10 September 2013. Extras for this version include: digitally restored picture and sound; an interview with John le Carré; scene-specific commentary by director of photographyOswald Morris; a BBC documentary titledThe Secret Centre: John le Carré (2000); an interview withRichard Burton from a 1967 episode of the BBC seriesActing in the '60s; a 1985 audio interview with directorMartin Ritt; a gallery of set designs; the film's theatrical trailer; and a booklet featuring an essay by film criticMichael Sragow.[8]
The film holds a score of 86% onRotten Tomatoes based on 14 reviews, with an average grade of 7.7 out of 10.[9]
Bosley Crowther ofThe New York Times wrote, "After all the spy and mystery movies of a romantic and implausible nature that we have seen, it is great to see one as realistic, and believable too, asThe Spy Who Came In from the Cold."[10]Variety called the film "an excellent contemporary espionage drama of the Cold War which achieves solid impact via emphasis on human values, total absence of mechanical spy gimmickry, and perfectly controlled underplaying."[11] Philip K. Scheuer of theLos Angeles Times wrote: "It is not an easy, certainly not a pleasant, picture to sit through; too impersonal, too objective, to move us to weep, so that its ending can only leave us tremendously depressed."[12]Richard L. Coe ofThe Washington Post declared: "Not having shared the evidently widespread admiration forThe Spy Who Came In from the Cold in its original form as a novel, I nonetheless find it a wholly absorbing picture."[13]Brendan Gill ofThe New Yorker called it "in every respect an admirable translation [to] the screen of the fantastically popular thriller by Jean [sic] le Carré."[14]The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Concentration is demanded; and earned by the tension and accuracy of the dialogue and the high level of performance ... [the cast] all give performances of a kind which instantly engage attention, even if the characters scarcely develop beyond the point at which we first meet them."[15]
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