The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is directed and produced by the versatile Martin Ritt, an American with a legacy of intelligent films and mature themes, including the somber, subdued, conflicted modern western Hud. He brings the same commitment to le Carre's vision. It's shot on location in Britain and Europe with a British screenwriter, crew, and cast, and it has a sensibility marinated in British restraint and Le Carre's ambivalence and mistrust of methods and motivations on both sides of the Cold War.
Richard Burton stars as Alec Leamas, a British agent with MI-6 who, in the first scene of the film, watches yet another undercover agent die while trying to cross over from East Germany to West Germany, shot while caught between checkpoints. It's enough to turn the once-sturdy agent into a disillusioned burn-out but there's a mole in the organization that needs flushing out or more agents are doomed to die. "I need you to stay in the cold a little longer," he's told after reporting back to Control, and so begins his decline into unemployment, private sector dreariness, the bottle, and possibly into high treason when a foreign agent comes shopping for secrets. It's a viciously clever and ruthlessly effective confidence game, emphasis on the ruthless.
Claire Bloom co-stars as Nan, an idealistic young woman who works at a strange lending library of books on magic and myth and supernatural topics and proudly serves at her local branch of the British Communist party. Her compassion for the wounded Alec (who tends to drink his lunches and keep his sardonic comments just barely civil) turns to romantic interest. She's the sole innocent in a world of double agents, ambitious officers, and cold, calculating spies, and Alec is genuinely moved by her commitment to an ideal that he knows very well has become a corrupted institution. Oskar Werner plays Alec's opposite, the brilliant young East German agent Fiedler, a true believer with a fierce commitment to service.
Richard Burton spent too much of his career going through the motions or distracting himself with drink but he delivers one of his finest, most nuanced performances as Alec Leamus, an agent who has to play the career man gone sour, surly and angry. He plays it so well that you have to wonder if Alec is simply letting own history of frustration and disappointment rise to the surface. He lets his face fall with apathy and alcohol, a dull stupor that goes away only when he's talking to his fellow agents. Even in private with Nan, ostensibly at ease and being a normal guy with a girl, he's in character, the broken, cynical man. He's the double agent as method actor, with the real man somewhere in between the blur of the two roles. If he's resigned to the cold machinations of spycraft, he's still taken aback by the callous manipulations of his superior officers as they pull innocent bystanders into the plot as insurance. It earned Burton a well-deserved Academy Award nomination (he lost to Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou) and BAFTA and David di Donatello Awards for Best Actor.
If the machinations of the Circus (as they refer to MI-6) is coolly dispassionate, it is downright cold-blooded on the other side of the Iron Curtain and the film makes no bones about the crude aristocracy in this so-called classless society. As Alec is recruited and wooed by increasingly senior officers, we see an arrogance of power and authority flaunted with an attitude bordering on derision, from simple displays of authority over underlings to flamboyant pageants of power in meetings, always trying to take control or show dominance. If Nan's faith in Communism represents the ideal, this crude feudal hierarchy is the reality according to le Carré.
It remains one of the most intelligent spy dramas made, and one of the most disillusioned. Martin Ritt casts a spell through the film, creating a tension in subdued dialogue scenes by suggesting the power plays under the surface of edged remarks and prodding suggestions. He shoots in shabby apartments, tawdry clubs, and rooms devoid of warmth for personality, the better isolate Alec, in a handsome, unshowy style. Ritt and cinematographer Oswald Morris choose to avoid the shadowy film aesthetics of dark rooms and night scenes and slashes of light, instead choosing a cooler, more natural look, a heightened realism stripped of extraneous detail. Morris's camerawork is restrained yet fluid, carving out the scenes with a sure sense of space, and the black-and-white photography seems just right for a film where the players are measured in shades of gray. Criterion originally released the film on DVD in 2008 and upgrades the disc for this Blu-ray release with a new digital film restoration that showcases the handsome cinematography. It's unglamorous, to be sure, yet the overcast look (does the sun ever break through the clouds of ambiguity?) is full of evocative atmosphere and precise detail and the HD presentation preserves the cool film texture.
The new Blu-ray features the supplements of the previous Criterion DVD release: select scene commentary featuring director of photography Oswald Morris, a 40-minute interview with author John le Carré, the 2000 BBC documentary The Secret Centre: John le Carré, a 1967 interview with Richard Burton from the BBC series Acting in the '60s conducted by critic Kenneth Tynan, a 1985 audio-only interview with Martin Ritt conducted by film historian Patrick McGilligan, a gallery of set designs, and a booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Sragow.
By Sean Axmaker
