The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. 1965. UK. Directed by Martin Ritt. Screenplay by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, based on the novel “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” by John le Carré. With Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner. DCP. 112 min.
Richard Burton stars as Berlin-based British spy Alec Leamas, who is tasked with posing as a defector in order to spread disinformation about a Stasi intelligence officer (Oscar Werner). Even if the assignment requires Leamas to pretend he’s being kicked out of M16, his disillusionment with his own life’s work is sincere, giving the drama a thrilling existentialist undercurrent. Like Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File (also released in 1965), Ritt’s film is a bone-dry riposte to the worldwide popularity enjoyed by Ian Fleming’s James Bond; the wonderfully serpentine screenplay is by Guy Trosper (One Eyed Jacks) and Paul Dehn, himself a veteran of the UK’s wartime intelligence services. Maverick auteur Martin Ritt (Hud) more than does justice to Le Carré’s novel, making what could have been a generic Hollywood potboiler into a chilly, dyspeptic, and ultimately haunting meditation on the postwar world order managed by Leamas’s higher-ups in London and Washington. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the first of a great many John Le Carré adaptations, but it remains one of the very best.