SPY films -- search and destroy

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, based on the novel by John le Carre, starring Richard Burton.

Definitely the best I've seen. kinda like the Ipcress File, in being an anti-james bond, but not at all corny. Some fantastic lines, and a wonderful ending. SEARCH!

more spy movies - bourne, bourne... anyone?

my friends just got me the tinker tailor soldier spy (w/alec guinness) mini-series dvd set thing! will report back
-- s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, September 23, 2004 1:57 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

Did you ever watch this, Slocki? Because I keep pushing it down my ntflx queue when it comes up.

does any SPY film beat this?

http://www.bibliopolis.org/graficos/dvd/tinkertailor.jpg

what a crappy cover! it's all bitty

this one's little better

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CWDFV79SL.jpg

but they should have gone with something more like this

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/drama/drama-series_s-z/tinkertailorsoldierspy1979al.jpg

someone add a grinning tony blair rising out of that empty hole

does any SPY film beat this?

no. but Breach comes pretty close imho.

the russian doll sequence is so awesome

OMG WHERE IS IT'S FACE - AIEEE

the equivalent sequence in smiley's ppl is k-lame however

"IT'S"

xp - all I remember of Smiley's people is the meeting with the girl, and I don't remember who she is (ricki's girl? karla's daughter or something?)

dude SPOILERS! i'm not sayin in case slocki hasn't watched it yet

smiley's people is a lot less well paced imo, tho BERNARD HEPTON'S HAIR is awesome

Okay, I guess I should watch TTSS then.

you should watch it first either way

I kind of just want to watch I, Claudius now.

zero degrees of separation!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/drama/images/claudius4_gall.jpg

^^^
anne smiley

haha also:
http://www.artofeurope.com/lynch/dune.jpg

Awesome.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/drama/images/claudius11_gall.jpg

http://www.pathguy.com/patrick_stewart_as_oberon.jpg

!

together they straddle the multiverse!

i get Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam and Helen Gahagan Douglas mixed up

i think we've all been there

richard kwizatz nixon

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, based on the novel by John le Carre, starring Richard Burton.

I watched this while I was sick last week at about 5 am, it is awesome. Pretty much line by line from the book too.

watching "The Ipcress File" now. You can definitely see where Mike Myers lifted a lot of stuff.

Beefaroni? Extraordinary.

Hopscotch. Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in a spy film during which NO-ONE gets killed!

Gets my vote as I've seen it so many times I can almost recite the script.

so, after cathching the first two harry palmer movies this week i'm v much in a brit cold war spy mood

to carry on with the palmer series, or to maybe look at le carre's stuff from the selection below, or what else might amuse me in that line?

Film

In 1965, Martin Ritt directed the first film adaptation of a John le Carré novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton as protagonist Alec Leamas.
In 1966, Sidney Lumet directed The Deadly Affair, an adaptation of Call for the Dead, with James Mason as Charles Dobbs (George Smiley in the novel).
In 1969, Frank Pierson directed The Looking Glass War, with Anthony Hopkins as Avery, Christopher Jones as Leiser and Sir Ralph Richardson as LeClerc.
In 1984, George Roy Hill directed The Little Drummer Girl, with Diane Keaton as Charlie.
In 1990, Fred Schepisi directed The Russia House, with Sean Connery as Barley Blair.
In 2001, John Boorman directed The Tailor of Panama, with Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, a disgraced spy, and Geoffrey Rush as emigre English tailor Harry Pendel.
In 2005, Fernando Meirelles directed The Constant Gardener, with Ralph Fiennes as Justin Quayle, set in the slums in Kibera and Loiyangalani, Kenya. The poverty so affected the film crew that they established the Constant Gardener Trust to provide basic education to those areas. John le Carré is a patron of the charity.
In 2011, Tomas Alfredson directed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley. The film was released on 5 September 2011 at the Venice Film Festival and in the UK on 16 September 2011.
Television

In 1979, the BBC adapted Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for television, with Alec Guinness as George Smiley in a six-part series. Two years later, in 1981, he reprised the role in Smiley's People. The BBC did not adapt The Honourable Schoolboy, the middle book of the Karla Trilogy featuring Jerry Westerby (Joss Ackland from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), because production in East Asia would have cost too much.
In 1987, Peter Smith directed the television adaptation of A Perfect Spy (BBC), with Peter Egan as Magnus Pym, and Ray McAnally as Rick.
In 1991, Gavin Millar directed A Murder of Quality (Thames Television), with Denholm Elliott as George Smiley, and Joss Ackland as Terence Fielding.

Is The Constant Gardener good as a spy movie? Haven't read the book either.

i thought it was pretty good, yeah. it's not spy as such, mystery might be fairer. socially conscious mystery. good cast and performances make that better than it sounds.

think you wld enjoy this one - similar vintage, alec guiness, harold pinter screenplay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiller_Memorandum

sounds perfect, duly noted!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Runner

very hazy memories of this one from childhood but i remember it as bleak, Palmer-ish, feel-bad and worth watching

Quiller Memorandam on Film 4 this afty, can't remember if youse guys can get that or not

The Counterfeit Traitor (1962) w/ William Holden is a good one in the realistic mode. Scorsese is a fan.

think you wld enjoy this one - similar vintage, alec guiness, harold pinter screenplay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiller_Memorandum

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 19 September 2013 14:29 (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was absolutely bonkers, pacing was like no other similar effort I can remember.

Not sure it worked at all but I enjoyed it

not really a spy film, but is BEAT THE DEVIL as good as i imagine it to be (having just finished the novel)

the novel is strange and funny -- it has an eric ambler feel, the ambler of the 30s, whose books are full of uneasily displaced europeans of murky provenance and agenda, thrown together into brief opportunistic alliance that inevitably goes uglysmash, in the shadow of the entire continent doing the same: tho of course BtD was published in 1951 and is technically set in the years just after the war, when the smash had already happened and everyone is picking up the pieces

(it was supposedly dashed off in weeks to drum up some cash, author and left journalist claud cockburn being legendarily short of same at all time)

(cockburn is the dad of alexander, patrick and andrew (and also the crime novelist sarah caudwell, who i keep meaning to check out): in the 30s he had set up a one-man proto-private eye called THE WEEK -- basically digests of scurrilous internal westminster gossip, said to have been more in-the-known than all the grand respectable newspapers of the day -- and, i'm guessing, better actually than PE has routinely been for years (bcz less smugly insidery and up itself: tho CC actually had a column in PE in the early 70s, when i first started reading it: i'd love to go back and reread them all but i donated those PE's to the city limits library in the late 80s, when i was clearing out my flat, a couple of years before CL went bust and its library scattered to the winds))

CC is also -- more notoriously -- the frank pitcairn who was the nemesis-bcz-the-opposite of orwell in spain, the despised british communist correspondent who cheerfully printed lies in the party's favour when reporting that war

(there's some quite good stuff on this in c.hitchens's otherwise very patchy book on orwell, since CH -- on the way to becoming an orwell hagiographer and neo-imperialist warmonger -- was in the 60s and 70s very welcome in the cockburn home and clearly still extremely fond of claud, who was a highly entertaining and talented rogue and fibber, and, like all his kids, an excellent writer, IMO a much better sentence-maker than orwell, and judging by BEAT THE DEVIL, a *far far far* better novelist) (slightly regretting history mayne's absence from ilx at this point in this post, i feel he wd have had interesting pushback on this? certainly he knows this milieu at last as well as i do)

(given his loyalties -- CC left the CP after hungary i think -- his brief portrayal of spain under franco in the novel is particularly fascinating)

er anyway, so recommend me or film of BEAT THE DEVIL? (or not) -- even tho it is not really quite a spy film?

the fourth protocol is a fun watch, a lot closer to the long good friday (with which it shares a director) than lecarre but enough of a blend to keep it lively and tense

fantastic cast, good procedural scenes, botches the last scene but up til then not much of a foot wrong tbh