In the two+ months since my shocking windfall courtesy Mrs. Renate Magdalena Settnik, Burkina Faso’s favorite paralyzed-philanthropic-German-widow daughter, my personal finances have taken something of a nosedive. With my accounts mysteriously drained, my credit rating in shambles and my utilities shut off for non-payment, I now find myself offering windshield

cleanings at dangerous intersections for pennies. In lieu of Windex, which is much too expensive, I have been using—pro tip, feel free to crib—a mixture of urine, toilet water and blue  food coloring left over from Easter egg decorating. Works a charm, actually—uric acid adds a sparkle to glass that ammonium hydroxide can’t touch.

Needless to say, that promised certified check for $28,324,275.00 can’t arrive soon enough!

That I have power to run this computer is nothing short of miraculous. I “found” a small Honda generator while passing the open garage of a neighbor down the alley preoccupied with unloading groceries. I have no gas to run it ($5.50/gallon!) but have found that the Honda also runs on Sterno, a generous supply of which I have from my last dinner party, hosted in better times.

Anyway, my deprivations pale in comparison to many of John le Carré’s characters so who am I to complain? As you’ll recall from our last post we looked at the filmed versions of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People before running them through the CFS’s proprietary/complicated algorithm to determine their worth.

In this post, let’s dig into some more adaptations so I can concentrate on something other than the grumbles of my empty stomach.

The Little Drummer Girl (1984, dir. George Roy Hill)

Am I the only person here that thinks George Roy Hill was a strange choice to direct what this humble critic thinks is one of Cornwell’s finest works? In case you may not know, from late sixties to the early 80s, Hill was one of Hollywood’s most bankable assets, the director behind dramedic/surrealist works including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), The Sting (1973), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), Slap Shot (1977), A Little Romance (1979) and The World According to Garp (1982). An eclectic CV, no doubt, but not one that indicates a predilection for deadly serious subjects such as The Little Drummer Girl’s Israeli-PLO conflict.

Quick synopsis: the Mossad wants to take down the notorious PLO bomber, Khalil. Of course, in typical le Carré fashion, this is anything but straightforward. The Israeli plot involves kidnapping Khalil’s brother to set a up ruse to recruit the anti-Zionist American actress, Charlie, who is then manipulated into acting as the brother’s girlfriend to get her closer to Khalil. Charlie, being very effective in her “role” as something of a double agent, gets deeper and deeper into this incredibly dangerous game, torn between her attraction to her Mossad handler, Joseph, and her sympathies to the Palestinians.

Released in 1984, the film opened to mixed reviews. Some felt Diane Keaton was miscast as Charlie, others felt the same about the scenery chewing Klaus Kinski as Martin Kurtz, the head of the Mossad operation, and yet others had trouble with so much dense le Carré plotting jammed into 132 minutes.

Personally, I liked the film. Can it hold a candle to the BBC One’s miniseries we’ll get to in a future post? Nope. But in general it was pretty faithful to the book (or at least as faithful as a two-hour movie can be to a 430-page book.) Is Hill’s handling of the material anything special? Not really; Hill was more a meat-and-potatoes director, not a visual stylist. That said, definitely worth a viewing.

• True to Source Material—6/10 (One can only capture so much of a novel in 132 minutes.)

 

• Mise en scène—5/10 (As mentioned, Hill will never be mistaken for Ridley Scott.)

• Gut-Wrenching Death—2/10 (No spoilers!)

• Moral Ambiguity—10/10 (Duh; it’s le Carré!)

• Final Verdict—6/10 (Not great but certainly watchable.)

 

 

A Perfect Spy (1987, dir. Peter Smith)

From our friends at Wikipedia: “A Perfect Spy is the life story of Magnus Pym, a British intelligence officer and double agent. After attending his father’s funeral, Pym mysteriously disappears. As his fellow intelligence officers frantically search for him it becomes clear that, throughout most of his career, Magnus worked as a spy for the Czechoslovak secret service.”

For those who aren’t deep into all things le Carré, it’s important to note the deeply biographical elements of this book and subsequent BBC miniseries. Was Cornwell a double agent? Of course not. But he did cut his teeth at MI6. What’s more, his father, as the fictional father in The Perfect Spy, was a charismatic, morally bankrupt hustler and scoundrel who made a huge impression on his son.

As with all BBC le Carré adaptations, this one is impeccably cast and acted. And with its 374-minute running time, it has plenty of time to breath, really digging into the moral morass of one of le Carré’s finest and troubling works about a life spent in deception.

• True to Source Material—9/10 (Gotta love these multi-part BBC productions!)

• Mise en scène—7/10 (More of the generally ugly BBC look of the 1970s/80s. Of course, this could just be the mediocre video transfer I’ve viewed. Luckily, this dreary looking production seems just right to tell the story of a man who, through a lifetime if deception, has lost his soul.)

  

• Gut-Wrenching Death—9/10 (No spoilers!)

   

• Moral Ambiguity—10/10 (Duh; it’s le Carré!)

• Final Verdict—9/10 (Depressing as shit but great.)

 

I couldn’t find a trailer but he’s a BBC “Coming Next” interstitial…

 

The Russia House (1990, dir. Fred Schepisi)

I saw this film on winter break from college in 1990. Upon returning to school, I mentioned this to an acquaintance who proceeded to tell me that he, too, had caught the film and thought it was the biggest pile of steaming shit he’d ever seen. He was wrong, of course; The Russia House is a classic, featuring what I believe to be Sean Connery‘s finest performance. But why debate the fool? He didn’t know the first thing about le Carré, let alone cinema. Might this have been the moment of the Conflicted Film Snob’s conception? Hmm.

Quick synopsis: At a book fair in Moscow, Katya tries to deliver a “manuscript” containing military secrets to Barley Blair, an English publisher who made an impression on the manuscript’s author, “Dante,” a disillusioned Russian rocket scientist (and Katya’s ex-lover), at a drunken retreat. Discovering that Blair is a no-show to the event, Katya gives the package to an acquaintance of Blair, who, terrified upon sneaking a peak at its contents, passes it on to the British authorities.

The manuscript appears to be the motherload—a damning picture of Russia’s military incompetence with a focus on nukes. Or is this a brilliant disinformation ruse created by Russian intelligence?

Blair is summoned MI6, questioned and recruited to help determine “Dante’s” true identity by returning to Moscow. It’s on this first trip that the alcoholic Blair, his life pretty much in shambles, meets Katya, falls in love and begins to find renewed purpose.

Per Blair’s questioning of Katya (a scene beautifully filmed, edited, scored and acted in a bell tower overlooking the onion domes of Moscow), it’s revealed that “Dante” is in fact Yakov Efraimovich Saveleyev, a preeminent Soviet physicist. The stakes continue to rise as Blair is summoned to a private CIA island to determine if he’s fit to continue the operation, which now has become a priority of both the Yanks and the Brits.

Blair is sent to Russia once more to deliver a “shopping list” to Yakov intended to extract even more crucial military information. As is wont in intelligence service thrillers, the operation soon begins to disintegrate, forcing Blair to choose where his loyalties truly lie: with England, or with the safety of Katya and her children.

• True to Source Material—7/10 (One can only fit so much book into 122 minutes. What’s more, Tom Stoppard, who adapted the book, and Aussie director Schepisi, definitely put their own spin on the material, employing a circuitous first half hour that confuses with time jumps and voice overs until, suddenly, it all makes sense. Check out Schepisi’s great adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation for a similar first-act feat.)

   

• Mise en scène—10/10 (Thanks Gorbachov and Perestroika, this was one of the first American productions allowed to film in Russia and Schepisi and his cinematographer Ian Baker made the most of it, demonstrating that for all its brutalist commie architecture, Moscow, Leningrad and the Russian countryside are still mysteriously beautiful. What’s more, we get Lisbon, London and a remote Canadian Island eye candy tossed in as a bonus.)

• Gut-Wrenching Death—9/10 (No spoilers!)

   

• Moral Ambiguity—10/10 (Duh; it’s le Carré!)

• Final Verdict—9/10 (This is a personal favorite film. Everything shines—the photography, the aforementioned direction by Schepisi, a wonderful jazzy score by Jerry Goldsmith featuring Branford Marsalis and, of course, the murderers row of great actors, including Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, Michael Kitchen, J. T. Walsh, Klaus Maria Brandauer. And then there’s Connery, who, looking all disheveled and beaten, gives a deeply emotional performance, his best in my humble opinion, one that should’ve been acknowledge by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1991. That said…I am subtracting one star for the very last scene before the end credits, which I suspect was dictated by nervous studio suits and then edited together by the people who created ABC’s After-School Specials. Does it ruin the film? No. But for God’s sake, there’s nothing wrong with a little ambiguity, people! It’s le Carré after all.)

 

The Tailor of Panama (2001)

Sadly, we had to wait another 11 years for a significant le Carré adaptation, this one helmed by John Boorman, he of Deliverance, Hope and Glory, The General and Excalibur to name a few, and starring Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush.

Quick synopsis: British expat Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a well-regarded tailor to many Panamanian elites, is—excuse the pun—a spinner of distorted yarns. While he maintains to his clientele and even his wife that he was a product of Savile Row back in London, he actually was an ex-con confidence man back in the day. Needless to say, he wants to keep these truths well hidden.

Enter Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan), a disgraced MI6 agent reassigned to the Panama backwater and looking for a way out. Osnard knows Pendel’s secret and threatens to reveal the truth unless Pendel passes information gleaned from his powerful and well-connected (including the President of Panama) clientele. Pendel, desperate for cash (he’s in debt via back investments), agrees.

But when the info he’s passing starts to underwhelm Osnard, Pendel begins “tailoring” the stories, whoppers involving potential revolution and a sale of the Canal to China that eventually make their way to trigger-happy American intel services in Washington. Chaos ensures and the noose tightens on our (anti) heroes.

• True to Source Material—7/10 (One can only fit so much book into 110 minutes.)

   

• Mise en scène—8/10 (The lushness and heat of Panama, as photographed by the great Philippe Rousselot, is certainly a change of pace from the generally dreary Cold War settings of typical le Carré.)

• Gut-Wrenching Death—6/10 (No spoilers!)

   

• Moral Ambiguity—10/10 (Duh; it’s le Carré!)

• Final Verdict—7/10 (A clever film, well acted and directed, that loses a couple pointed for the following: 1) in the book, Oxnard is a tubby schlub who exudes so much confidence he’s able to bed and satisfy even the most unattainable women, whereas in the movie he looks like Pierce Brosnan, which strips some of the humor from his conquests. And 2) the book had the satirical gumption to have our troops actually invade Panama based on Pendel’s tall tales, whereas in the film they stop short of such “anti-American” outcomes. I suspect because, while le Carré could give zero fucks whose feels might be hurt by his pen, Sony Pictures had to tread a little more lightly.

 

 

Coming in Part 3!

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

A Most Wanted Man (2014)