The spy who came in from the cold

Britain 1965

Dir: Martin Ritt

112 mins

Cast: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner: based on the novel by John Le Carré

Rating: PG

Based on the bestselling novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré. It’s a tense Cold War thriller of espionage and double-crosses that’s brilliantly plotted and scripted by Paul Dehn and Guy Troper. Richard Burton gives one of his best ever brooding performances and the entire talented cast matches his first-rate performance. ... Director Martin Ritt (Hud/Hombre/ The Outrage) can’t dish out his usual liberal message and is left only with a pessimistic message about the spy game on both sides of the curtain that won’t be too pleasing to anybody from patriot to dissident. In a masterful semi-documentary style narrative, avoiding a James Bond look or any gimmickry, Ritt helms one of the better spy dramas. It’s brilliantly shot in a noirish black and white monochrome by Oswald Morris. ...

What is smashing is the film’s lack of moralizing about what’s right or wrong and any showing of sentimentality. It instead reveals the secret downbeat dark and seedy work of the agents, all seemingly banal sorts, and the film’s shabby look filters down from the characters to the dreary landscapes–all of which lend a convincing air to the charged story.

 Dennis Schwartz: “Ozus’ World Movie Reviews”

Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, adapted from the 1963 John le Carré novel of the same name, might be one of the coolest movies ever made, in all senses of the word. Literally, because the characters always seem to be pulling their jackets against their necks while tucking into offices or bars for refuge from the wind. Figuratively, because Ritt orchestrates the film’s ebb and flow of emotions with a finesse that’s chilling. The characters could be discussing tea, or liquor, or a brilliant plot to indirectly assassinate a powerful East German intelligence officer or his ambitious underling interrogator, or something else altogether, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from a cursory evaluation of the conversation’s tone. You would have to look deeper at inflection and context, and you’d have to probably be familiar with decades of global politics and theoretically suppressed British intelligence gathering, in order to fully understand what anyone is actually saying. ... In his greatest performance, Burton turns le Carré’s thriller of heightened protocol into a song of the damned, merging le Carré’s fictionalized pseudo-autobiography with his own.

Chuck Bowen & Derek Smith, Slant Magazine