Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (novel, miniseries, and forthcoming film to be directed by Tomas Alfredson)

the miniseries is pretty amazing. i haven't read the novel. i just saw this bit of news, which is a little old but hopefully still accurate:

Tomas Alfredson signs on for 'Tinker, Tailor'

July 09, 2009 Fresh from the success of highly acclaimed vampire movie "Let The Right One In," award-winning Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has signed on as director on Working Title upcoming project "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," the company announced Thursday. The new feature film adaptation of John Le Carre's seminal cold war best-seller is being produced by Working Title's co-chairmen Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and marks their next collaboration with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Peter Morgan ("Frost/Nixon," "The Queen") and will be exec-produced by Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin, John Le Carre and Peter Morgan. A 1970s British television series starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley the retired former British intelligence officer called in to track down the double agent within the spy agency.

this sounds awesome

been musing on the possible cast. i hope it's a similar set of dope brit character actors surrounding an old-school charismatic star.

Yeah both miniseries (including Smiley's People) are stellar. One of my favorite moments is in SP when Smiley finds the film using 'Moscow rules.'

i downloaded a torrent of the series but there are no subtitles during the lengthy bits where theyre speaking russian

ian mcshane for percy? ian mckellen as bill haydon?

love the book, love the miniseries. only problem with it is i cant remember who i lent it to.

interesting project, but i cant really imagine anyone doing better than guinness. that was a truly magnificent performance.

s1ocki otm

I have a hard time imagining that this could touch the miniseries, which was pretty much perfect.

i have a hard time imagining that i can't touch my miniseries as someone has borrowed it and i can't remember who :(

i hope this isn't a horrible travesty that makes me sad - because the original miniseries was so great.

alec guinness' performance is on another level in the miniseries, true. i think it's possible to make a good film of this and get everything into 150-160 minutes without rushing through. i have a good feeling about this one though i'm not expecting it to be a definitive take (that's already been accomplished obv.) i assume the choice of alfredson means they won't try to bourne things up too much.

Mmmf, something just occurred to me -- are they going to try and make this a period piece or are they going the contemporary route?

This could be interesting but I'd be concerned that the slow, twisty procedural of the book, which worked well on TV, mightn't transfer properly to a 2 hour movie.

the opening scene of the 70s 'tinker tailor', where the spies all sit down and smoke, not saying a word but speaking volumes, is prob my fave bit of telly ever, partly cos i used to work very near cambridge circus, seen in the very first shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyBuUM6BRy0

Absolutely agree. One of my favourite pieces of television ever. I wonder whether the new film will also consist of an awful lot of footage of middle-aged men smoking in dingey rooms.

odd that they're redoing it, but love love love Alfredson and Morgan.

they should have done the middle book The Honourable Schoolboy instead, at least that one hasn't been taken yet :/

That one always was a little out of place, though. Don't get me wrong, it's excellent.

Yeah, I found Honorable Schoolboy to be a little odd and difficult to relate to.

Is it just me or do a disturbing number of his novels end with the protagonist just about to make it to safety when they are suddenly brutally gunned down?

Hahaha yeah

spoilers?

wonder how this is gonna work, really

but it'll be good to have gary oldman starring in a non-shit film for a change

don't count yr chickens etc

the tv show is veeeeerrrryyyy slllooooooowwww but that's part of the charm

michael bay to direct

the tv show is so insanely good

so slow and subtle

so awesome

the opening scene of the 70s 'tinker tailor', where the spies all sit down and smoke, not saying a word but speaking volumes, is prob my fave bit of telly ever, partly cos i used to work very near cambridge circus, seen in the very first shot:

― Ward Fowler, Friday, November 20, 2009 6:52 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

otm

not mad on guinness's stuff when he was younger, tbh, but he totally shreds in this

yeah i was just thinking about watching this again. "smiley's people" is really good too.

i remember watching the tv show when i was abt 12 and liked le carré, i wanted to like it but it was too slow for me then

benedict cumberbatch hahaha just fucking cast bill nighy and make it a romantic comedy*

*[placeholder for explanation of how it already is]

wonder if they'll leave in the two female characters

i really love how the tv version kind of starts off on this note of smiley being this totally out-of-the-loop outsider who is "too old for this shit", and then he sits down with the british agents at the estate house to meet with the spy-on-the-run, and he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

mark strong just got cast, too. so it's him and oldman, firth, cumberbatch, hinds, ralph fiennes and tom hardy.

Holy shit. It might actually work.

Yeah, I found Honorable Schoolboy to be a little odd and difficult to relate to.

One big problem with that one was the woman character, who is as badly drawn as all Le Carre women characters (with possible exception of Connie). I do wonder sometimes whether Le Carre has ever met any actual women.

But I still totally love TTSS and SP.

he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

otfm

Absolutely the best moment of the whole series, I get chills just thinking about it.

not sure if this was mentioned but it's apparently retaining the cold war era for the setting.

Thank god for that.

man i gotta find my dvds of the show so i can watch it again

I have a hard time imagining that this could touch the miniseries, which was pretty much perfect.

― Moodles, Friday, November 20, 2009 11:44 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have a hard time imagining that i can't touch my miniseries as someone has borrowed it and i can't remember who :(

― 311 is a joek (s1ocki), Friday, November 20, 2009 11:57 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark

it's always in the place where you least expect it, like the amazon marketplace page of your friend or acquaintance.

Unwittingly I've only watched the compressed, US six-episode (instead of seven) version of the series. Apparently they've even jumbled the chronology of some scenes around. Anyone seen both?

oh shit, that's the version i've seen too (via netflix).

Basically I'm going to get and watch the original no matter how trivial the differences might be. Every scene could be longer. Feels like I can still taste the words exchanged between Smiley and Prideaux in the car, at the hotel, walking around the moors.

Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1322727/Kathy-Burke-star-film-version-John-le-Carr-s-Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy.html

gonna be great this i can feel it. god knows how they're going to squelch it all down to 2 hours. if they can nail the Ricky Tarr bit they've got the rest i think.

tom hardy playing ricky tarr fyi

super stoked for this... killer cast

the was it a ballet dancer is a good example that anne enjoys experiencing different men. different flings. it’s attractive and that JLC allows it to be attractive is to his credit.

i say that in response to an interesting article u read recently comparing fleming and le carre and where their lives meet their fiction (wrt to the recent biographical revelations) somewhat in fleming’s favour.

i mean i read it. i have no idea if u all read it.

i like the idea of u as singular we should make that happen

it was a ballet dancer, they were iirc a sensation for a season

I just started Honorable Schoolboy ("the first few chapters are truly execrable") but it's... quite enjoyable? I'm curious what Le Carre going full 1970s airport novel looks like. It's scarily long, though.

its got seriously objectionable aspects and ive recently added another one- the audiobook is read by michael jayston, who does a really brilliant job of TTSS but it soon becomes clear that not having his bbc castmates to imitate (or having a wider range of accents to attempt, perhaps) renders his efforts here absolutely unlistenable

I'm going through his books now as audiobooks since I can't sleep at night, and much as I love Le Carre I haven't really liked Micheal Jayston's reading of the Smiley novels. His voice is too constricted, old-sounding and querulous.

I'm now chronologically up to The Little Drummer Girl. I loved that more than any other Le Carre book when I read it in the 80s, it had a romantic aspect that distinguished it, but the prospect of Michael Jayston reading it to me now does not thrill me

The Honorable Schoolboy was the most chaotic Smiley novel in my opinion, it was enjoyable but was really hard to piece all together

You’re all out of your minds. Jayston’s audiobooks are great. (Apart from the American accents)

not THS- Australian is painful

Fair. the “Asian” accents in that aren’t great either. Bad audiobook of a bad book.

He can do some non English accents (perfect spy and small town in Germany are full of them).

If you think he’s bad you should listen to the night manager read by David case. Preposterous.

I think this is my fault, as I read The Secret Pilgrim for the first time this week and enjoyed having a few more stories set during the various Smiley eras…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/10/john-le-carres-son-to-write-new-george-smiley-novel

george groany

Amazon was pushing his Titanium Noir on me in recommendations but ugh

"A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites. • “Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway.” —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency"

Anyone seen the new morris doc on Apple TV yet?

rip jerry westerby

roddy martindale might be among my most bad and hated characters ever

https://media.tenor.com/kRKSXNGI84sAAAAC/what-have-you-been-doing-alec-guinness.gif

'love to ann!'

https://snappishproductions.com/images/gfy/love-to-ann.gif

most other characters just give it to her directly

i’ve got the line “Willie Andrewarthur always was the most godawful liar” stuck in my head. Something v earwormy about Nigel Stock’s performance.

me confusing nigel stock with nigel bruce (both of course played sherlock's watson, albeit several decades apart) totally made me wtf for a moment there lol -- nigel bruce was NOT in tinker tailor soldier spy

never read sherlock

was watching this (again). smiley’s “oh damn! oh damn!” after his meeting with martindale is in the book caused by realising he’s left the volume of grimmelshausen he’s just bought at the club. in the adaptation he has “entrusted it to the postal service” after seeing peter guillam trying to intercept it. makes it a bit of a clumsy or incoherent line, even for alec guinness.

he’s left it at the club. he didn’t buy it at the club.

nigel bruce as roddy martindale would have been a thing!

this is imo unresolved

in the series it seems a very deliberate detail in the change a d in the timing of the change

ann likes smiley bcz he's secretly 1 x GOTH

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Simplicissimus_Cover_page1669.jpg

xpost

the other - obvious - thing is that a) martindale is quite an appealing character and b) that he gets v close with his gossip and surmise to the heart of the problem.

expresses what is said at the end of the book - that everyone in some way *knew* it was haydon. it was just impossible to admit - psychologically or organisationally.

this is imo unresolved

in the series it seems a very deliberate detail in the change a d in the timing of the change

hard to imagine smiley monologuing (word? sp?) so coherently and stagily alright

but i meant, and still mean, the decision to post the book

oh yes. i think it’s a decision forced by the dramatisation tbh. too awkward to get it into the club and post club scenes.

maybe it shorthands smiley seeing gwilm and changing his plans, gives him an object to explicitly speak to someone about that shows this happening

as i noted in the obit thread, now that Michael Jayston has passed away, all of the main cast of the BBC series is now gone. though we've still got Ann Smiley and Karla.

isn't this the opening episode of smiley's people https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/21/ex-royal-marine-charged-with-spying-for-china-found-dead-in-park

"Moscow rules"

would had to have been an aging HK activist in exile who had been promising MI6 a big score

https://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/GUEST_4cf25035-8c3c-4dda-b42f-9bfe4c2eefb7?wid=488&hei=488&fmt=pjpeg

i mostly like harkaway's own books and i suppose if anyone's gonna do this it might as well be le carré's own kid, but . . . go make up your own characters, man

well do or dont (preferably dont) but calling it a john le carre movie is a cunts move

/novel

watched bbc 1979 episode one again and now despite the liveblog above ive decided its chance and weakness that has him lunching with martindale, and he isnt in fact pumping for info at all, and is irritated that he is half interested, and he is very irritated above all to hear that alleline is doing well

if i watched it again id change my mind on some of the above again im sure, isnt that the beauty of it

https://snappishproductions.com/images/gfy/love-to-ann.gif

I think this is mostly true, but he's also never quite out of spy mode, there's always a side that he's hiding. That whole first episode seems to be illustrating the fact that his meek manner is a bit of a put on, and we see him finally transform into the "real" Smiley at the end when he sits down with Ricky Tarr.

thinking about buying a region-free Blu Ray player to get the remaster set w/ TTSS and Smiley's People

You really need a region free for so many great BFI releases

Watching Ralph feinnes in conclave and I keep thinking this guy would have been a better smiley than Gary oldman.

Too striking IMO, even trying to look schlubby he wouldn't fade into the background

same criticism of Oldman tbf and more a directors choice i think

Just rewatched Smiley's People (again.) What stood out to me this time was how Smiley turned into whoever he needed to be for each interaction. For the lovesick German hippies he was all smiles. For Connie he coddled and raged. For Grigoriev, officious. It's only around Guilliam that he drops this, and when he does he's such a demon for work that he exhausts the younger man. Beyond that though I just caught so much more detail this time, easily my most enjoyable viewing of this.

I swear at one point in this (TTSS) Alec Guinness emotes more with the back of his head than he ever does with his face.

listening to the jayston-read audiobook again because of a few long car journeys

few things that idnr being covered upthread but which may have been

i. its not not a movie about class but i feel its still a movie where a lot of the snobbery is about different ideals of craft (army, whitehall, circus, their lot vs our lot, why tarr isn't ever getting ahead of where we find him). herself disagreed violently on this by merely listing out class indicators evident which led to a spirited tiff from tulsk through to beyond swinford bypass.

ii. because he doesn't necessarily come back very quickly on whatsapp it is worth noting that fizzles raised how arthurian motifs raise their head again and again and yes ofc ofc but he noted in particular ageing arthur, guinevere, lancelot and i went oh

iii. this time around, it struck me very strongly that Anne's distress at George's inability or unwillingness to fight his corner after the ellis affair is a main driver in the estrangement during the book. she loves smiley as the best of them and notes his pride in it but she seems a lot more alarmed at the damage laying that sword down will do to him/them than the effects of any actual extramaritals she may and will engage in (leaving out haydon ofc)

watched the movie as well

butchering the ricky tarr timeline unnecessarily is the great sin. what they turned esterhase into is the other. smiley being a bill nighy turn is the other. finishing shitcool and triumphant is the other.

none of these are fatal sins tbh its still very good.