The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: A broken man, that's what I am
"I don't believe in Father Christmas. I don't believe in God."
First of all, thanks and hello to the new subscribers. I want to apologize for the erratic schedule of the posts. In the last several weeks, they have been published on different days of the week. Life intrudes, but consistency is key. I’m looking to do better next year. As always, thanks for reading and Happy Holidays.
The man wears a tattered raincoat most of the time, for it always seems to be raining in this part of Britain. The rain pools on darkened streets, illuminated by bits of lamplight. He lives in shabby flat, works a dead-end job in a local library, categorizing books. He spends his meager earnings largely on whiskey. He avoids others. He is a ruined man.
But he holds a secret. The man, Alec Leamas, is an operative for MI6, back in the U.K. after several years in the madness that was Berlin during the Cold War. He wants out of the game, wants to come in from “the cold.” His supervisor, known only as Control, appears to understand. “We have to live without sympathy, don’t we?” he says. “We can’t live that way all the time.”
But instead, he offers Leamas one final mission: Go undercover, appear to be a down-and-out, disaffected alcoholic former spy and let yourself be recruited by the Communists to cross over. Strip yourself of any ego, any vanity. Look like you have nothing to lose. Frame a top East German official in order to take him off the board. Then, come home and retire.
The story is familiar to anyone who has ever read the works of John le Carre. In the film adaption of le Carre’s first work, a best-seller, Richard Burton plays Leamas. Le Carre said he would have preferred a less bombastic choice, someone like the British actor Trevor Howard, who had a key role in The Third Man. Burt Lancaster was also considered for the part, but le Carre viewed him as too American. (As an actor, Lancaster, too, often was less than subtle.) But Burton got the part and immediately began butting heads with the director, Martin Ritt. At one point, Ritt reached out to le Carre to come to the set and serve as a buffer between them. To be, in essence, Burton’s drinking buddy.
But if you were looking for someone to portray a ruined man, a burned-out shell, you couldn’t do much better than Richard Burton in 1965. Burton had once been viewed as the next great English actor in the tradition of Olivier; he had done Hamlet at the Old Vic. But fame, booze and his stormy romance with Elizabeth Taylor derailed him. He was, in the modern parlance of the Instagram age, more famous for being famous than for anything else.
All of it added another layer to Alec Leamas’ subterfuge at the beginning of the film. Is Leamas playing the role broken-down alcoholic or is it truly what he has become? Is Burton tapping into his own pathologies and regrets about the career he could have had? 1There is a deep-seated ruefulness to him, a despondent cynicism that seems authentic. He’s seen too much. He’s done with fighting for abstractions, for isms. “Capitalist, Communist,” he says to his co-worker at the library, Nan (Claire Bloom). “It’s the innocents that get slaughtered.”
Even through his dissipation, Leamas retains the presence of a once-formidable adversary, and there remains a vestige of hubris within his shattered soul, one that ultimately is skillfully manipulated by his own handlers. After defecting, Leamas mocks his East German counterpart’s commitment to the cause.
I don't believe in Father Christmas. I don't believe in God or Karl Marx. I don't believe in anything that rocks the world.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold came out at the peak of James Bond-mania. It premiered in the United States in December 1965, a week before Thunderball. That it shares nothing with the glamourous world of 007 is precisely the point.
As Leamas notes in the movie’s most famous monologue, this is a tale about small, squalid men doing morally questionable deeds as part of a larger game that lies beyond them. Le Carre’s message, made explicit in the film’s opening scenes, is that there was no difference, tactically, between East and West. Each side employed the same methods with same brutal pragmatism. Men like Leamus didn’t matter in the grand scheme.
Unlike Bond, they couldn’t save the world, and they never got the girl.
Martin Ritt made the movie about as distinct from Goldfinger or Thunderball as possible, shooting it a gloomy, almost noirish black-and-white that was then out of fashion, infused with a melancholy, unobtrusive score by Quincy Jones.2 The feel is recriminatory—as if the Cold War was already a smoke-belching, piston-driven industrial force that could not be scaled back, one that too encompassing for the men and woman charged with carrying it on.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is free on YouTube and can be rented on a number of platforms. It’s also part of the Criterion Collection, if you’re into the physical media thing.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Bernard Lee, who you know better as “M” in the Connery Bond films, has a small role. So does actor-director Sam Wanamaker, who, bear with me, is included as a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for some reason known only to QT.
DUST CLOUDS: The Berlin Wall, which features prominently in the film, was erected by East Germany in 1961 to prevent migration from the Soviet Bloc to the West and entirely encircled what was then known as West Berlin. It included guard towers and contained what was known as a “death strip” – a stretch with beds of nails and other defenses to prevent residents from crossing. East German guards were ordered to shoot at anyone attempting to breach the well, while, as the film notes, the West German guards were told that they could not provide cover fire to assist anyone in escaping, lest it be viewed as an act of war. The number of people killed while trying to cross over is disputed, but at least 140 deaths have been documented.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 1/10. The balance of power is never challenged; no threat from the Soviets is ever documented except for the existential one, which goes unremarked upon. It’s a story, as Leamas says, about “civil servants playing cowboys.”
WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING: For much lighter Cold War fare: Mirage (1965) starring Gregory Peck as an amnesiac on the run in New York. TV: Slow Horses, Season 5 (Apple TV); For All Mankind, Season 4 (Apple TV); Fargo, Season 5 (FX/Hulu).
LAST ENTRY: Red Heat (1988).
NEXT ENTRY: North by Northwest (1959) It’s the holidays, man.
See also Burton’s terrific performance as the defrocked minister in The Night of the Iguana (1964), a personal favorite. He would make his crowning achievement, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in 1966 with Taylor. If you haven’t see it, maybe don’t watch it over the Christmas holiday. (Although for some misanthropes, it might be the ideal holiday movie.)
Ritt had previously made a winning film featuring another morally ambiguous everyman with Hud (1963), starring Paul Newman.
Well done, Jim. I enjoyed reading this.