Sidney Lumet (1967)
It’s hard to be sure with such a crummy, undistinctive title but I don’t think I’d heard of The Deadly Affair before it turned up on Talking Pictures this week. To be fair to John le Carré, the title of his novel, on which the film is based, was better – Call for the Dead is even mildly intriguing. Another significant name change occurred in the adaptation of the source material. Call for the Dead, le Carré’s debut novel, introduces his best-known character, George Smiley, but Paramount acquired the screen rights to the name in the deal they struck with le Carré for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) even though Smiley is only a minor character in that story. He’s the protagonist of Sidney Lumet’s picture, made by Columbia, in which he has become Charles Dobbs and is played by James Mason. To be honest, extraneous details like these are more interesting than most of what’s on screen in The Deadly Affair but there are a few compensations. The film now comes across as both typical of its time and a curiosity.
The Deadly Affair’s date of release immediately suggests it was made on the back of the box-office success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Paul Dehn wrote the screenplay for both films. Each was directed by a respected Hollywood name whose recent work had fared well critically and/or commercially. The Spy’s director, Martin Ritt, had made Hud (1963); the latest from the notably prolific Sidney Lumet included Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), The Pawnbroker (1964) and The Hill (1965). The Deadly Affair goes further than its predecessor in terms of high-profile international casting. Except for Oskar Werner, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s main cast are native English speakers; The Deadly Affair has key roles for two recent Oscar winners, Maximilian Schell and Simone Signoret, as well as for one of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies, Harriet Andersson. There are big-name contributors behind the camera and on the soundtrack, too: cinematographer Freddie Young, who’d won Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965); Quincy Jones, who wrote the score for Lumet’s film along with a ‘theme song’ performed by Astrud Gilberto, by now internationally famous for ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.
The action takes place in contemporary London, where MI6 man Charles Dobbs investigates the sudden and unexpected death, apparently suicide, of Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng), an admitted former communist. Fennan is dead by the end of a day that began for him in Hyde Park with what seemed a mutually positive meeting with Dobbs. The latter’s suspicion that Fennan’s death isn’t what it seems is increased by an interview with Fennan’s widow, Nazi concentration camp survivor Elsa (Simone Signoret). Although his bosses want Dobbs to drop the case, he unofficially teams up with Mendel (Harry Andrews), a Met police inspector, and they uncover a network of Eastern European agents. Meanwhile, Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell), with whom Dobbs worked during World War II, is in London on a visit from Switzerland. Dobbs soon realises that Ann (Harriet Andersson), his promiscuous wife (forename unchanged from le Carré’s original), is having an affair with Frey.
As usual in a John le Carré thriller, an involved plot is repeatedly interrupted by wordy speeches about the moral murkiness of post-war espionage, Britain’s decline in the shifting world order, and so on. (I can’t certainly pin this on le Carré himself, having read only The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and some of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but it’s a standard feature of screen adaptations of his work.) In any case, the storyline yields few surprises. It’s not only familiarity with Tinker Tailor that makes the identity of The Deadly Affair’s key villain, the mysterious ‘Sonntag’, very obvious. First, Maximilian Schell surely wouldn’t have agreed to play Dieter Frey if he were little more than Ann’s latest love affair. Second, as soon as Sonntag’s Swiss connections are mentioned, you know he must be Dieter Frey – doubling his betrayal of his old comrade-in-arms and Dobbs’ anguish at Frey’s treachery. Frey is the forerunner of Bill Hayden in Tinker Tailor, a personal and a political traitor who has been screwing both Ann Smiley and his colleagues in British intelligence – but here’s another interesting fact. Ann’s affair with Frey was Paul Dehn’s invention for the film. It seems le Carré decided to make use of the dual betrayal idea when he set to work on Tinker Tailor.
Sidney Lumet’s direction of the actors is slack. James Mason, saddled with the spying’s-a-rotten-business jeremiads, nevertheless gives a decent performance but he’s not only too handsome for the role but also too theatrically dynamic in it. (Alec Guinness casts a long shadow over Smileys or aka Smileys past and future.) There are also times when Mason seems to lose concentration. The supporting work of the home side is highly variable. Kenneth Haigh is tiresomely animated as Dobbs’ colleague Appleby, Max Adrian characteristically witty as his boss, and Harry Andrews excellent as Mendel – he manages to combine eccentric details (Mendel falls asleep at the drop of a hat) with a convincing portrait of someone getting on capably with a challenging job. The more exotic casting also yields mixed results. Maximilian Schell is no more than OK. Harriet Andersson, a great actress, is a disaster as Ann: she doesn’t get the hang of the character, let alone of delivering lines in English. Simone Signoret, another great actress, is superb as Fennan’s widow. With quite limited screen time, Signoret creates a remarkably rich sense of the psychological legacy of Elsa’s unhappy past.
The oddest feature of the film’s clumsy attempts to be a prestige international number is the involvement, announced in the opening credits, of ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall’. This comprises two sections inside the Aldwych Theatre. The first, presumably a skit on ‘classical’ theatre (though an embarrassingly unfunny one), is a rehearsal for Macbeth. Corin Redgrave is terrible as the impatient young director, his sister Lynn not as bad as a clueless, debby ASM. For some reason, the three witches include Frank Williams (the vicar in Dad’s Army). The second RSC episode, consisting of excerpts from Edward II with David Warner as the king, takes place as Elsa Fennan anxiously waits for Dieter Frey to join her in the stalls while Dobbs, Appleby and Mendel, further back in the auditorium, keep a close eye on Elsa and the seat next to hers. It’s a bit insulting to Warner and his RSC colleagues (Michael Bryant, Charles Kay, Timothy West et al), who seem to be doing their best, to have them appear just in order to be upstaged by the spy story reaching its climax beyond the footlights.
Few of the main characters get out of the film alive. The Deadly Affair includes more than enough violence, especially the sequences where Adam Scarr (Roy Kinnear), a dodgy cockney car dealer who’s somehow mixed up in the spy network, gets punched and kicked, thrown down a flight of steps and pushed over the edge of a building to his death. Quincy Jones’ score is promising – as a sub-John Barry composition – under the opening titles but it’s forgettably generic once the film proper is underway. The mushy melody for Astrud Gilberto’s love-theme number seems to recur, usually without the vocals, every time Harriet Andersson’s Ann appears. It’s like a musical stalker.
19 July 2025
