John Le Carré Series: 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'

“'So will I,'” Pym promised loyally and meant every word. Like Rick he was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment,” (p. 120).

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), dir. Martin Ritt

Welcome to the first piece in my John Le Carré series, where I’ll be reviewing every adaptation of his novels. I started reading his work at the tail end of my senior year of college. A critic/Succession podcast host I followed on Twitter posted the above excerpt from A Perfect Spy, Le Carré’s semi-autobiographical magnum opus. Le Carré’s prose is always a pleasure to read, and lately I’ve been falling asleep to A Perfect Spy on audiobook (Chapter 2 may be one of his finest passages). The above quote refers to the protagonist, Magnus Pym, learning to betray others the way his father Rick did. Rick, like Le Carré’s real father Ronnie, was a lifelong con-man, and his story in both real life and his son’s fiction is fascinating. The throughline in Le Carré’s work is betrayal – of one’s country, loved ones, and even oneself.

“Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray,” (p. 202-3).

That quote comes from George Smiley, Le Carré’s most famous character, in his 1965 novel The Looking Glass War. It is the keystone to Le Carré’s exploration of the human condition through his novels, which can be divided into mid- and post-Cold War. His Cold War-era books typically follow the bureaucrats and field agents of England’s espionage services, including their psychodrama and office politics, as they covertly toil to uphold a world order (that is morally ambiguous, at best). His post-Cold War writing, however, usually plunges non-spy characters into the world of espionage and has a stronger focus on broad geopolitical and social issues. 

Like many before me, my Le Carré journey started with his 1963 breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a great distillation of what defines his work. With the shocking central betrayal at the center of the book, Le Carré asks, “...how far can we go in the defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?” (p. xiv).

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

The novel and the film are both relatively brief – my edition of the book runs 225 pages, the film 112 minutes. The film is directed by Martin Ritt and stars Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an aging British spy in East Germany whose last agent has been killed on the orders of Hans-Dieter Mundt, a former Nazi turned Communist who leads East German intelligence. The head of The Circus (the fictional name Le Carré gives to the British intelligence service), Control, asks Leamas to go on one last mission, posing as a British defector to East Germany in order to frame Mundt as a British double agent (something Mundt’s subordinate, the Jewish Jens Fiedler, already suspects him of). 

The action in Le Carré novels happens in conversations, files, and the interior lives of his characters. It’s slow, deliberate, and rewarding to read, but can prove a challenge to adapt. The gradual piecing together of information is made less satisfying when condensed into a 2-hour movie, but despite this limitation, the film acquits itself admirably. Your mileage may vary when it comes to characters sitting in a room explaining the intricacies of a payment scheme that implicates a double agent, but personally, I live for that shit.

Exhaustive conversations between Leamas and his interrogators that last multiple days in the book are slimmed down to a handful of scenes that communicate the complicated plot points simply but eloquently. Dialogue is sometimes lifted wholesale from the novel, and at other times, invented. It’s a testament to the skill of writers Guy Trosper and Paul Dehn, the latter a former professional assassin, that the changes jive well with Le Carré’s original dialogue. The conversations and speeches are witty and incisive, and lead to moments that enhance Le Carré’s original vision. A small exchange at the end of Leamas’ interrogation with Peters (Sam Wanamaker), with whom he has a perfunctory relationship in the novel, is cute and lends a bit of warmth to their time together:

Peters: Tired?

Leamas: Aren’t you?

Peters: No. I didn’t have any drink with my supper.

Leamas: I didn’t have any supper with my drink.

The double agent operation that gets pulled inside-out by the end of the book is undeniably complicated, and re-reading the book had me asking questions about who knew what at which stage. In that way, the film does an excellent job of emulating what it must feel like to be a spy, living “on several planes at once,” the information given to you always changing. Despite this, the film keeps things moving along at a brisk pace so as not to get bogged down in the details. 

As an adaptation, The Spy Who… keeps things close to the chest. Minor events are rearranged or in a couple cases even removed, but never to the detriment of the film or derailing of the original plot. In the book, Leamas says goodbye to his lover, a young Communist woman named Liz, before assaulting a grocer and going to jail, which leads to East German intelligence recruiting who they perceive as a disgruntled ex-spy. In the film, he assaults the grocer, goes to jail, and upon his release Liz (who was re-named "Nan" in the film, at the insistence of studio executives so as to avoid confusion with Burton’s real-life wife, Elizabeth Taylor) meets him and they spend more time together. 

Ritt and co’s decisions about what to leave, what to keep in and how to arrange it all indicates a strong understanding of the novel and its essence. Le Carré, for his part, does an excellent job of imparting how miserable and dull these peoples’ lives are. As Leamas puts it, spies are “a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors…pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” The film brings this to life with its black-and-white photography, courtesy of cinematographer Oswald Morris, who in his DVD feature commentary says he “tried to make it look…as downbeat and as awful as possible because they’re awful characters, in that they are sick people…” The photography certainly captures their literal, downcast grey world.

The one character exempt from being awful is Nan, initially Leamas’ coworker at a library and later, his lover. Where Leamas is cynical, she is idealistic. She believes in history, he believes “that a Number 11 bus will get me to Hammersmith. I do not believe it will be driven by Father Christmas.” Despite their differences, their relationship is one of the few genuinely sweet, loving parts of the film and the book. It helps that Nan is played by Claire Bloom, with whom Burton had romantic history. “It wasn’t to be pretentious, it wasn’t to be sexual, it was just to be a genuine, gentle relationship,” Morris says in the commentary. That this small slice of real love can exist in such a dreary world just makes the tragedy of the story all the more acute. 

The actors who populate the movie help propel it beyond a straightforward adaptation. They lend humanity, however twisted, to the bleak world. Everyone except Nan and Fiedler (Oskar Werner), Mundt’s enemy and Leamas’ temporary ally, seems to know the score. Nan and Fiedler are young, sprightly idealists, whereas everyone else is a cynic. Fiedler, during one of his interrogations of Leamas, urges him to share what motivates him to be a spy – his “motor”. “You have to have a philosophy,” Fiedler argues. Leamas, with one of his many great lines of ambivalence:

“I reserve the right to be ignorant. That’s the Western way of life.” 

Control (Cyril Cusack), who hilariously pronounces Leamas as “Leam-ass,” has the moral calculus of espionage all figured out: “You can’t be less wicked than your enemies simply because your government’s policy is benevolent.” Mundt, a perfectly cast Peter van Eyck, radiates this stone-cold ruthlessness with his face alone. His actions at the end of the movie indicate that he, like Control, knows that to stick to ideology in this world is shortsighted and downright fatal. Leamas knows as much too, as if this mission wasn’t a lesson enough from his masters. By the time we arrive at the film’s final moments, he is put to the test and must make the choice of who, or rather what, to serve.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is available to buy or rent on YouTube. The Criterion Collection DVD sits proudly on my shelf at home (shoutout to fellow BFB writer Jess for the gift!) if anyone wants to hang out or borrow it. Future installments of this series will focus on Le Carré’s post-Cold War fiction, starting with the 2016 adaptation of his 1993 novel The Night Manager.

-Nick