The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. (Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace” 1946.) 

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film Cold War seemed to spark a wave of nostalgia for one of the darkest eras of world history, the period between the descent of the Iron Curtain shortly after World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. The film tells a personal story of love and sacrifice that was inspired by Pawlikowski’s own parents. But in its period design, costumes, and especially its evocative black-and-white cinematography, it reminded people of a lost world of tragic beauty and of lost lives. 

By the time The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carré’s third novel, was published in 1963, espionage literature was thriving. Ian Fleming published most of his James Bond books in the 1950s, and the movie franchise was gathering momentum with From Russia With Love, the second installment, in wide release. The Bond films introduced the world to a new kind of hero, a cynical Cold Warrior whose sexuality was as much a weapon as his .32 caliber Walther PPK – except it wasn’t concealed. 

But Le Carré was after bigger game. He was attempting to write a serious novel on the same subject as Fleming, free from the winks and the nods at fantasyland of the Bond series. Le Carré’s spies were all too human. Leamas, the hero of In from the Cold, dies at the novel’s conclusion. And not so he could spring miraculously to life in the next installment. Alec Leamas is a 50-year-old agent based in sectored Berlin. We first find him at Checkpoint Charlie anxiously waiting for an agent to come across from the east. He peers through binoculars from a guard shack at the opposite gate only fifty yards away. The man he’s waiting for, pushing a bicycle, makes it past the first barriers and looks as if he’s made it. Suddenly the alarm screams, spotlights turn on him, he mounts his bike and starts to ride to safety, but the guards shoot him down. 

Leamas returns to London and stops at the “Circus” (whose offices in the film are incongruously on Trafalgar Square). He is shown directly to the office of “Control” who presents to Leamas some outrageous sophistry about the two sides in the Cold War having different aims but that use similar methods. “I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now? That would never do.” So he asks Leamas to stay out in the cold for awhile longer, to act like the disgruntled agent shunted to a desk, to get drunk regularly, and to end up on the dole – all of it to attract the attention of the other side and convince them that he may be ready to turn on his former employers. 

But it’s all part of the operation to cast enough doubt on a member of the East German Abteilung that it will encourage his subordinate to accuse him of treason. The operation succeeds, but Leamas wasn’t told who the real target was until its conclusion. “And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly tuck.” In their last moments together, when she relentlessly asks Leamas why he did what he did, he bitterly tells her:

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?

The additional dialogue in the film script is more explicit than in the novel. One of the writers, Paul Dehn, also worked on a few Bond films. When Nan invites Leamas to dinner at her flat, she tells him she’s a communist. He laughs and tells her he doesn’t believe in anything. He tells her a story about witnessing a small car and the family inside get crushed between huge trucks on the autobahn, and says “Communism. Capitalism. It’s the innocents who get slaughtered.” The innocents in the film are surely the idealogues – the true believers in the Worker’s State, Fiedler and Nan. At the last sad moment of the film, in which Smiley calls out to Leamas to jump from the wall and save himself, Leamas ignores him and climbs down to Nan, lying motionless on the ground, and he is shot down as well. 

The film is almost a perfect transposition of the book. Martin Ritt coaxed a beautifully-graded performance from a difficult Richard Burton. He wears a raincoat in nearly every scene, and when he goes to seed, he does it with aplomb. The revelation in the film is Claire Bloom as Nan (Liz in the novel - her name was changed for reasons personal to Richard Burton). When she is called to testify in a tribunal, there is a look of such disillusion in her eyes that the scene is terribly moving. Also excellent are the two German actors, Oskar Werner and Peter van Eyck, who play a Jew and a former Nazi in the Abteilung. Michael Hordern puts in a beautiful turn as Ashe, and there is even Bernard Lee, who played M in the first eleven Bond films, as a grocer beaten up by a drunken Leamas.

Crucial to the film’s effectiveness are Oswald Morris’s crystalline black-and-white images – far more evocative in 1965 for being necessary rather than an aesthetic choice in the Pawlinowski film. And Sol Kaplan composed a slow, sad score. A lugubrious saxophone contributes powerfully to the film’s overall tone of despair. At last finding something worth dying for, Leamas chooses to remain outside in the cold.