The Birth of the Cold

Peering out from below a broad, heavy brow, he has the pale face of a man thoroughly eaten up inside. The London he moves in looks damp, grey and bone-chilling. He wears his trench coat tucked up around him like a blanket, and puts away half a bottle of whiskey a day. He has no friends and speaks as little as he can get away with. He takes a menial clerical job at the library for the Candahar Institute for Psychical Research, where he works alongside a pretty, confident young woman. She explains to him what lycanthropy means in a weirdly sexy way that suggests he might just be some sort of werewolf, and she likes the idea. What matters, perhaps, is that he is so clearly someone other than he claims to be. It may just be the starkest romance in movies, and it really works.

But I’m jumping ahead. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) actually begins with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) stalking Checkpoint Charlie, waiting for a man to cross over on a bicycle. A tense piano, Satie-esque, plays over the barbed wire, flood lights and brick. Things won’t go well. The photography is black and white, and this Berlin seems to have forgotten about things like trees—this is one Cold War movie that looks irredeemably cold. Leamas will soon be back in London, where he visits Control (Cyril Cusack) and takes a new assignment that will keep him “out in the cold,” pretending to defect in a ploy to turn one German intelligence agent against another. The brief period of work at the library was only meant as a fleeting ruse, but Leamas’ unexpected connection with Nan (Claire Bloom), who, in a tidy bit of dramatic irony, is a card-carrying communist, will complicate that. We know how these things go. It’s a spy movie, and thus perpetually mired in the forbidding causality that comes with the milieu: everything complicates everything. Everyone is a pawn of some sort.

John le Carré’s third novel, released two years previously, was a sensation, de-glamorizing the world of intelligence just as Bond was cashing in at the box office, yet so brimming with intrigue, brutality and human frailty, courting our appetite for dirty little secrets, that no one bothered to notice how wildly bleak it was. At least until they saw Martin Ritt’s movie of it, which failed to startle in the same way, though it earned Oscar nods. But The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is now available in a deluxe two-disc edition from Criterion. I just saw it for the first time, and what can I say? I’m startled. Ritt, who also made Hud (63), Hombre (67) and Norma Rae (79), may not have a reputation as a master stylist, or even a master of anything in particular, but here, in collaboration with cinematographer Oswald Morris, production designer Tambi Larsen and editor Anthony Harvey in particular, he produced something of marvelous texture and specificity. It’s transfixing.

Burton, whose Leamas now reads as part of the formula that gave birth to Daniel Craig’s Bond, may brood to excess for some—including, reportedly, Ritt—yet the character’s near-suicidal desperation, his immersion in his soul-crushing vocation, lies at the very heart of the story. And morose as Burton is, the overall gloom is greatly tempered by Bloom, so charming and smart, whose every nuance is so exactingly turned. She’s the sole woman in the movie, as well as the sole outsider to Leamas’ world, and she’s nearly its only source of warmth. Yet Oskar Werner, just a few years after Jules and Jim (62), plays Fiedler, a Jew in German intelligence with a massive grudge, and also possesses a certain air of inner life and excitement. And he also connects in his way with Leamas. Cusack, too, is wonderful, vampiric in his stillness, and so very English. So the cast inhabits rather than simply populates this world.

Ritt’s method of taking it all in includes a great deal of god’s eye views to heighten the alienation, balanced by two-shots that constantly emphasize the coded negotiations taking place in smallish rooms. The camera prowls, always. Lamps hang from chains in one location, from thorny antler-like mounts in another, all dangling with portent. There are beautifully timed fades to black, like the one near the start where Leamas sits with un-sipped tea in hand in Control’s office. Near the end there is a superb, ambiguously menacing exchange of gazes between Leamas and the ex-Nazi Mundt, and its after this exchange that we begin to understand how the whole narrative builds to a point of proving Nan’s ideological distinctions meaningless just as it completes Leamas’ moral perdition.

A highlight among Criterion’s supplements is a new interview with le Carré. He speaks very engagingly and has an endearingly refined way with gossip, stories about screenwriter Paul Dehn, who, matching le Carré’s own background as a British agent, was once a professional assassin; about various affairs between the collaborators and Liz Taylor's lurking in the background; about Ritt’s difficulties with Burton and how their antagonism might have been unconsciously nurtured by both of them so as to turn up the tension in the film. Le Carré also critiques the film quite soberly, and interestingly, believes that if anything it was too faithful to the source material. For myself, I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like had the film started with Leamas taking his job at the library so that we initially knew nothing more about him than Nan does, and made our discoveries roughly in step with hers.