The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

A Cold War spy film. Alec Leamas runs a station in Berlin. In the first scene he is waiting for a man; the man tries to cross the wall and is shot. With that, the last person in his network is gone. He is called to London. He is not dismissed, as would be expected; he is made an offer. The plan is this: Leamas will appear to be a man who has fallen. He will take a job in a library, drink, run up debts, get into a fight and go to prison. The other side should see him like that and try to buy him. The plan works. They find him and take him to East Germany. From there the film becomes an interrogation and a trial. With the information he gives, Leamas is trying to bring down an official on the other side; the man facing him believes the whole thing is a construction. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but being used: both services spend their own people and treat it as a line of cost. The film offers not one consoling sentence about it. There is also a woman. Nan, whom Leamas met at the library, knows nothing and is placed inside the plan. The source is John le Carré's novel; the author had worked in the trade himself. Richard Burton plays Leamas. Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner and Peter van Eyck are in the cast. The film is in black and white; it shows espionage as tired and dirty rather than glamorous, and the genre changed after it. Martin Ritt directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes realistic spy stories and bleak Cold War films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action; the film is almost entirely talk and its ending is hard.