The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965)

This film is considered a classic of its genre. I knew this ahead of time, with two consequences:

• My expectations were quite high, perhaps unreasonably so.
• The ending is rather famous, so I was aware of it before I sat down to watch the movie.

I anticipated that the second issue would be a bigger problem than the first, but it was the other way around: The ending (which I won’t mention explicitly in this review) is practically a foregone conclusion that I would have predicted even if I hadn’t known about it. I’ve read that critics were disappointed with it at the time, but I think they missed the point: Large swaths of the plot are all about how individual spies – and people – are expendable, and that it really doesn’t matter how nice you are or what your cause is: the rules of the game state that no one is safe. The film has to end the way it does, to drive home that central message.

That said, the movie isn’t predictable in its entirety. In fact, for a while there I was wondering when the espionage would start. The main character, Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), is a spy alright, but one his superiors consider burnt-out and ineffective. He’s offered a desk job, but he refuses and leaves the agency. Leamas does not adjust well to civilian life; he has difficulty holding down a job, drinks too much, has anger management issues, lands in prison for a short while.

A Dandy in Aspic (1968)

Like this blog, A Dandy in Aspic starts in medias res. Well, that’s not quite true. It starts with a stylish 60ies opening title sequence, in which a puppet is jerked around by red and blue disembodied hands until it gets completely entangled in its strings. Said puppet, the audience soon understands, is Eberlin (Laurence Harvey), a British spy who is also a double agent for the Soviet Union. That’s not a spoiler; not only does the film reveal this within the first 20 minutes, it’s also plastered all over the back cover of the DVD (not to mention the original poster, embedded on the right). On orders from Moscow, Eberlin (né Krasnevin) has killed a British agent, with whose funeral the film begins in a lovely match cut from dropping body to dropping coffin. His british superiors suspect a mole within their ranks and task Eberlin with ferreting him out.

The storyline reminds me of another Cold War spy thriller, No Way Out (1987) starring Kevin Costner. I admittedly last saw it many years ago, but from what little I remember, it is a (stereo)typically American affair, and indicative of the time it was made in: lots of action, lots of gratuitous sex, and lots of suspense as to the identity of the mole, with the inevitable big twist at the end. Despite the plot similarity, there is apparently no direct connection between the two films; Out is a remake of a 40ies film noir, though one completely unrelated to espionage^[1]. In any case, where Out is somewhat stereotypically 80ies American, Dandy is stereotypically 60ies British^[2]: