Daily Archives: Tuesday, June 28, 2016

  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt (1965)

    I read John le Carré’s book, published in 1963, during my term abroad in France in 1978.  The blurb on the back included Graham Greene’s judgment, ‘The best spy story I have ever read’, for which I’ve always been grateful.  I decided that, if this was the best, life was too short to read any more spy stories.  (I did actually make a start on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a year or so later, but soon found it unreadable.)   Near the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the eponymous agent, Alec Leamas, makes a key speech to Nan Perry[1], the girl who loves him (and whom, I suppose, Leamas loves back – as much as he can).  Nan is (or starts off as) an ardent Communist.  Inveighing against the morally bankrupt world of Cold War espionage, Leamas is scathing about his line of work – ‘What do you think spies are:  priests, saints and martyrs?’[2] he asks derisively, before telling Nan what grubby small fry he and all his kind really are.  This self-deprecating quality isn’t shared, however, by Leamas’s creator.  Le Carré’s work is tedious because of his god-awful moral solemnity and because what he has to say is windy and obvious – the stuff about the traumatising effects of loss of (the British) empire in Tinker Tailor, for example.   Still, the BBC’s highly successful dramatisation of that book in 1979 was highly enjoyable too – so it wasn’t the case that I’d deliberately avoided the screen version of The Spy in the thirty years since I read it.   Sally doesn’t believe me but I was prepared to think well of it.

    The well-known opening sequence takes place at the Berlin Wall and Martin Ritt quickly establishes the film’s moral universe (which ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ pretty well epitomises anyway).  There’s Sol Kaplan’s spare, melancholic, slightly self-important music.  There are Oswald Morris’s beautifully lit black-and-white images, which do so much throughout to contribute to the bleakness.  And, once he turns towards the camera (we see the back of his head while he speaks his first few lines), there’s Richard Burton’s ravaged and unsmiling – and, as Sally noticed, mysteriously unblinking – face.  Once the scene is set, however, it’s set in stone:  the film is monochrome in more ways than one.   Leamas is utterly disillusioned from the word go.  The only way he can develop as a character in the course of the picture is to be un-disillusioned (clearly a non-starter) or to die.  How much you get out of The Spy depends on your appetite for and ability to understand the machinery of the plot, and I’m close to being a lost cause on both counts.  I could never get to grips with what was going on nor, quite soon, did I want to.  (I remembered nothing from the book except, as soon as she appeared in the film, that the girlfriend was shot dead at the end.  I’d forgotten even that Leamas was too – perhaps because his existence already seems so much a living death.)

    It hadn’t occurred to me before that the deglamorised secret agent is a close relation of the private eye.  Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean’ could apply to Alec Leamas, and not just because of his mac.  Leamas may have a drink problem and be prone to violent outbursts but the implication is that these express a self-loathing caused by the job he does – and by a capacity, which indicates his moral superiority to others in the same business, to rail against the spying game as symptomatic of a bloody awful world.  And the Cold War specifics of The Spy make this now seem a vanished world too – as much a part of the past (and as mythic) as the private detective classics of the 1940s.

    Did people in the mid-1960s take this film as seriously as its tone – bitterly reverent – suggests it should be taken?  I’d guess yes and no.  The political context of the story was, of course, taken extremely seriously:  the threat of nuclear war was oppressively real and the defection of spies one of the emblems of East-West tensions.  But a spy film didn’t need itself to reflect that angst in order to capitalise on it.  The James Bond series is the most obvious evidence of that but it was interesting to see The Spy only a few weeks after North by Northwest, which was made six years earlier.  The Cold War is part of the texture of Hitchcock’s film yet he and Ernest Lehman turn the espionage story into a jeu d’esprit.   The similarities and differences between the two films are equally striking.  Their who’s-fooling-who complications turn the plot of both into something virtually abstract:  in North by Northwest this appears deliberate and is amusing; in The Spy it seems unintended and rather ridiculous.  Although what befalls Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest isn’t remotely credible and you know he’ll come out on top eventually, you keep rooting for him – it matters emotionally whether he survives the crop-dusting plane, that he (with Eva Marie Saint) doesn’t fall from Mount Rushmore.  Richard Burton’s Leamas is meant to be grittily believable and engaged in matters of life and death that are only too real – yet you couldn’t care less about him (or Claire Bloom as Nan).

    That said, Burton is very well cast as the protagonist of a story involving a rich impasto of duplicity and so much talk.  (The talk includes loads of information, as well as the occasional spasms of purple prose invective:  the screenplay is by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper but I’m more than willing to believe they’re reproducing le Carré.)  Burton’s vocal skills allow him to make everything sound apparently meaningful; his deeply jaded spirit makes you doubt whether he means a word that he says.  The film would be pretty negligible without his presence and without Oskar Werner, wearing a very weird shiny cap and entertainingly theatrical as someone in the East German secret service (I think).  The exchanges between these two have a bit of zing, although you feel it’s the actors, rather than the men they’re playing, who are sparring.  The most inadvertently funny sequence, even though it goes on for ages, features an East German tribunal, chaired by Beatrix Lehmann (flanked by Steve Plytas and David Bauer).  My favourite bit in the whole picture was when Lehmann asked the defence lawyer (George Voskovec) if he wanted to put any questions to Leamas and he smilingly replied, ‘In a moment – but first …’.  You know how long a moment this is going to be.  The acting all round in this scene is comically hammy.

    Others involved in the continental action, and joining in with the overplaying, include Sam Wanamaker and Peter van Eyck (the intelligence officer whose allegiance is being investigated by the tribunal).  Back home in London, there’s Cyril Cusack (good as usual, as ‘Control’), Bernard Lee (M in the Bond films of the period and therefore amusingly cast as a shopkeeper here), Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy.  George Smiley is played by Rupert Davies, whom British TV audiences of the time knew as Inspector Maigret.  Leamas first gets to know Nan at the library of the Society for Psychical Research where she works (as does Leamas briefly).  This is run by a dragonish spinster (Anne Blake).  There are some obvious scornful jokes about her and the stock on the library shelves but settings like this and the grocer’s shop have a relatively unstressed sense of time and place.  They’ve stayed in my mind more clearly than the picture’s more dramatically charged locations.

    13 August 2009

    [1] According to Wikipedia, the girl’s name in the book, Liz Gold, was changed ‘because the producers were worried about out-of-context quotes of [Richard] Burton from the film being used in reference to his real-life wife’.

    [2] This is the line in the book; it may have been slightly different in the film but the message is the same.

  • The Spirit of ’45

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Loach (2013)

    Ken Loach’s documentary has a U certificate – ‘suitable for audiences aged 4 years and over’ – and there’s no doubt this is political history for those who’ve not learned much about it yet.  The public screening of British political propaganda in documentary form is unusual enough in itself to make watching The Spirit of ’45 an interesting experience, although its appearance in cinemas is doubly ironic.  First, because it wouldn’t be getting any release at all if Ken Loach wasn’t a celebrity of British film.  Second, because the audience of this paean and exhortation to working-class solidarity will be overwhelmingly middle class.  The Spirit of ’45 supplies a good description of what the Attlee government tried to do – and, to what now seems a very remarkable extent, succeeded in doing.  This part of the film culminates in shots of the Festival of Britain, the post-war Labour administration’s poignant swan song:  the rapid closure of the South Bank exhibition by the incoming Conservative government in late 1951 only enhanced the Festival’s power as a political symbol.  Loach cuts from these images straight to Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street in May 1979 and the words of St Francis of Assisi.  To hear the arch dismantler of the post-war consensus express the hope of bringing harmony never fails to amaze and infuriate but Ken Loach’s complete excision of the complicated time between 1951 and 1979 is annoying too.  He and most of the people he interviews in The Spirit of ’45 can’t possibly have approved of the Tory governments in power for more than half the twenty-eight years between the exit of Attlee and the entry of Thatcher.  Given the purity of their socialism, it’s hard to believe these witnesses thought much of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour administrations that held office the rest of the time.   But four-year-olds in the audience, and quite a few older people, will naturally assume from Loach’s storytelling that everything carried on fine until Margaret Thatcher spoiled it all.

    Ken Loach offers no explanation of how The People allowed the Attlee government’s overall majority to plummet from 146 seats in the 1945 general election to five seats in 1950, and Labour to lose power the following year.  The evasion is frustrating.  There were obviously good reasons for a country that had just been through six years of war to become impatient with continuing austerity in peacetime.   Loach appears to have little interest either in analysing the reasons for the Labour landslide that brought Clement Attlee to power, preferring to present the election outcome as an expression of a common will forged by the people of Britain working with and for each other during the war years.  But Loach does at least include a couple of instructive passing references to other important factors.  One of the very few right-wing contributors to The Spirit of ’45 is a Tory MP called Maurice Petherick (he died in 1985), who reads a letter from a constituent deploring the radical indoctrination of the British armed forces, warning that they’ll return from the war ‘pansy pinkos’.   There’s also mention of Tory election literature in 1945, quoting Friedrich Hayek’s belief that the roots of Nazism lay in socialism.  This hints at a theme more fully developed in a BBC television documentary of a few years ago, which suggested, convincingly, that Churchill’s attempt in the July 1945 election to characterise the Labour leadership as a totalitarian menace made no sense to an electorate that knew Attlee, Ernest Bevin et al as important and trusted players in Churchill’s wartime government.  In The Spirit of ’45 there’s just a brief clip of Churchill on the hustings, being heckled by a section of the crowd and looking rather nonplussed by the experience.

    Ken Loach has assembled a rich and fascinating collection of news footage – and he does well to set the political developments of the 1940s in the context of the enormous and terrible poverty of the inter-war decades.   You’re reminded too, by excerpts from public information films of the time, how much Britain sounded like a socialist country in the late 1940s as it never had before or has since:  the posh voice of the commentator on these films, which tells the audience what’s good for them, gives the instructions an establishment seal of approval.  But Loach distorts the material visually as well as intellectually.  The interviews are filmed in black and white, even though most of them seem to have been conducted recently.  That seems phony from the start – but you assume it’s to show the interviewees as still infused with the spirit of ’45, as consubstantial with the monochrome newsreel of the time.  The decision to stick with black and white beyond 1979 may be meant to express the grimness in the Thatcher years of the workers’ ongoing struggle but the contrived visual scheme is counterproductive.  It’s not just the fact that anyone who’s seen Margaret Thatcher’s St Francis moment thinks of it as happening in colour.  By not showing the Virgin Mary blue of the Blessed Margaret’s costume, Loach makes her misappropriation of Christianity less rebarbative than it actually was.  It’s the same with his shots of the city boom boys of the 1980s:  the monochrome drains their garish dynamism and reduces their offensiveness.

    Loach also detracts from the distinctive power of the black-and-white archive film by decolourising so much else.  At the very end, however, he does the opposite.  The film concludes with a replay in colour of newsreel sequences shown in black and white at the start of The Spirit of ’45.  (I’ve assumed from the closing credit for a colourist that black and white was their natural state.)   The final shot is of a young woman who’s part of a celebrating crowd in 1945.  The frame freezes on her smiling exultantly.  It’s a strongly real image:  you can’t help noticing on her blouse the darkness of sweat from the pit of her raised arm.  You can’t help noticing either that the image serves as an epitome of Loach’s approach to the material.  The young woman is surely celebrating VE Day rather than the coming of socialist government.  Ken Loach’s intentional blurring of the two things is objectionable – and I say this as someone who’s very tempted to see 1945 as a hallowed, golden time because Britain won and Labour won (and my parents got married).

    A larger proportion of the British population in 1945 was working class than it is now but Labour still had to get votes from elsewhere on the socio-economic spectrum to gain the huge victory that it won.   Loach’s thesis that we need to revive the spirit of ‘45’ to repeat the trick ignores the practical problem of how to do that when the class balance has shifted in the intervening decades.  He turns a blind eye too to the evolution of working-class values since 1945.  One of the men interviewed condemns the sale of council houses in the 1980s; Loach doesn’t go anywhere near acknowledging that one of the most pernicious legacies of the Thatcher era was to make narrow self-interest a standard attitude among many people, from various social classes, who advanced materially then.  Some of Loach’s witnesses – especially the doctors and nurses and a woman who now chairs a national pensioners association – are eloquent and admirable people but more than one of them echoes what seems to be Loach’s own naive belief:  that rekindling a sense of decent, common purpose is all that’s needed in order for socialism to return to Britain.

    One of the most infuriating things about supporting the Labour Party is that many of its members prefer powerlessness – it means their moral superiority is inviolable.  But Ken Loach goes further than that.  In an interview with The Big Issue coinciding with the release of The Spirit of ’45, he makes the case for a new political party to replace Labour, which he believes to be irredeemably ‘degraded’.  It’s no surprise that Tony Blair isn’t even mentioned in the film (he must be miles beneath Loach’s contempt since he’s not even a class traitor) but the omission of any reference to Harold Wilson’s governments is more striking, and more illustrative of this documentary’s blinkered point of view.  For Ken Loach and, I guess, most of the people who appear in the film, modest incremental moves to greater fairness count for nothing and the Wilson administrations’ handling of the economy is regarded as a failure by people of widely differing political persuasions.  During the Wilson governments of the 1960s, however, capital punishment was abolished and abortion and homosexuality were legalised.  As the Conservative journalist Alex Massie pointed out in response to Ken Loach’s Big Issue interview, you need to define your terms carefully – much more carefully than Loach does here – in urging a return to the Britain of 1945.

    23 March 2013

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