Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
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Movie Reviews of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Movie Review: John LeCarre, BBC at Their Best
Summary: 5 Stars
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,"the 1979 British Broadcasting Company's 6-part television serial is, of course, based on the masterful novel, of the same name, by British spymeister John LeCarre:Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The novel, itself, was the first of LeCarre's Smiley-Karla trilogy, that ends with Smiley's People, also marvelously filmed by the BBC as Smiley's People.And, as the beneficiary of a first-class production by the BBC, "Tinker" achieves masterpiece status itself. The series, adapted by the talented Arthur Hopcraft for the screen, follows LeCarre's complex novel rather closely, giving us the intriguing plot developments,the well-rounded characters, and the witty dialogue. Furthermore, the BBC hired some of the best available actors for the many principal roles, and surrounded them with all the extras, the cars, and the location shooting any viewer could wish.
The plot concerns George Smiley, forcibly retired, along with a number of his good-guy friends, from Britain's spy service, called "the circus" by Le Carre. It is realized that there may be, within the spy service, a mole: a term created by leCarre himself to describe a person recruited in the past, and worked into a sensitive position, before being awakened to start reporting on his surroundings. To, in this case, Smiley's opposite number, the feared Karla, chief of the ruthless Russian spy machine. As it is realized that there is such a person working, and he is responsible for an unthinkably large amount of damage, including the deaths of several spy networks, and the dismissals of Smiley and friends, Smiley is drafted to locate him. But Smiley must work in secret, with only limited help from the official circus.
Alec Guiness plays Smiley with an instinctive understanding of the character that has seldom been bettered. He is, as mentioned previously, surrounded by some of the best actors available: Bernard Hepton as Tobe Esterhase, chief of the go-to boys; Ian Richardson as the mysterious Bill Haydon, Ian Bannen as the victimized Jim Prideaux, Alexander Knox as Control. Also Michael Jayston as Peter Guillam, Smiley's protege; Anthony Bate as Oliver Lacon, seasoned bureaucratic infighter; George Sewell as Inspector Mendel; Terence Rigby, and Michael Aldredge. There's only one casting mis-step; Hywell Bennett as Ricky Tarr, the spy whose unthinking love affair, with a pretty Soviet agent, begins the unraveling of the circus's dark secret. Bennett, who was the pretty-boy flavor of the month back then, simply cannot hold the screen with all these heavyweights.
It requires some patience, and full attention, to follow this intelligent series, that sometimes moves too slowly for American tastes, but those efforts are surely rewarded. This series is John LeCarre, and the BBC, at their best. However, you might want to be sure you can watch it on successive nights, rather than as it was originally shown, on a weekly basis: it's a lot easier on the memory that way.
Movie Review: A magical transformation
Summary: 5 Stars
Will the endless debates over the transformation of a book into a film ever be resolved? More than one TV miniseries has shown how proper casting and directing can produce some outstanding successful conversions. Even so, few approach the excellent production of John Irvin's rendition of John Le Carre's famous spy thriller. With superb casting and close following of the original story, Irvin has produced an almost flawless conversion of a narrative into a visual presentation.
Irvin's success might have rested on his capture of Alec Guiness to play George Smiley. Irvin, however, collected a stunning array of talent to portray one of the world's great spy stories. If you've read the book, you will see Le Carre's characters come to life with rarely seen precision. Guiness, of course, is an incomparable George Smiley. Reserved, unquenchable, distanced from both the ones he loves and despises, he carries an intense story with practiced ease. His task seems insurmountable - how to find a long-established "mole" within "The Circus". This agency, run by a driven man close to his dotage, has been penetrated by a Soviet agent right at the top of the hierarchy. "There are three of them, plus Alleline" - "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier" with one the traitor that must be unearthed.
Irvin is able to keep the suspense at its height as George, the one man deemed trustworthy to "Go backwards, George? Go forwards?" in the words of Foreign Office functionary Oliver Lacon [Anthony Bate] who brings Smiley filched records each night to peruse. Tucked away in a seedy hotel used as his headquarters, Smiley must sift through skimpy evidence to pinpoint the traitor. Is it Toby Esterhazy [Bernard Hepton] the Hungarian émigré now more British than Control himself? Roy Bland? Or the effete and pompous Bill Haydon, who has designs on George's distant wife Ann? None have real apparent motives beyond ambition for the top. Irvin keeps us in the same level of suspense Le Carre achieved with the novel. Guiness carries the story through with aplomb, Irvin's direction and camera work adding to the story's intensity.
There are few flaws in this film. Some of them are even invisible. An interview with Le Carre himself reveals that the medieval visual wonders of Prague are actually of a Scottish city! A character that opens the story is returned in a string of vignettes. You wonder what brings a crippled agent back to centre stage. It is Irvin's only failure that he omits the scenes from the book imparting Jim Prideaux's [Ian Bannen] intense British patriotism. The omission weakens the series' conclusion, making it less ambivalent than the original novel. That aspect, however, will be missed only by those who know the book. Even someone who's never read the book will find this series captivating. It's something to be watched again and again. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Movie Review: Television as an art form
Summary: 5 Stars
Of all of fiction's spies, Smiley, the master of bureaucratic warfare, is the most believable. Casualties in the Cold War were few, at least in the rich countries. The Cold War was a shadow war largely fought by men like Smiley - grey, methodical and alert to any inconsistency, whose battlefields were the minutes of obscure committees and the cross-referencing of appointments to junior posts in trade missions in filthy third world provincial capitals.
It is this battle of the bureaucrats that is depicted in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and it is depicted with such biting accuracy that one forgets just how daring a screen play as lacking in action as this is. It is hard to imagine a television commissioning editor these days, especially in the BBC, going ahead with a series with an opening as somnolescently cryptic as this one - four men in suits enter a room, unannounced, undescribed, reading and smoking but saying nothing. There is no music or subtitle. After perhaps a minute, one of them says, "We are ready to begin." And so begins one of the most beautifully crafted series in television history.
This series, as said, doesn't major on action. The mystery is as complex and difficult to piece together as any good spy mystery, but the plot is fairly simple - Smiley must uncover the traitor before he does any more damage. What this series excels at is character and atmosphere - it evokes the 1970s wonderfully, a 1970s where Britain was managed into genteel decline by chain-smoking toffs in expensive suits who harked after the lost battles of an Empire they loathed and repined for at the same time. There are no two dimensional characters, no cardboard cutouts here - everyone is delightfully rounded, even the extras.
The Empire is all but forgotten now, as is the post-Imperial malaise which followed it; the tension in the British establishment between pro- and anti-Americans remains, but the Cold War has been replaced by new conflicts, more clear cut and without the shadow of the bomb. We are unlikely to find well-heeled Cambridge graduates from the dominant ethnic group running off to join al-Qa'eda these days.
The toffs haven't gone, but they have mutated - gone into camouflage. While continuing to send their children to the best schools, they have mockney demoticised their accents, swapped their suits for fleeces and banned smoking from their offices. This series beautifully evokes the Britain of the 1970s, in the silent period between the two social revolutions of the `60s and the `80s.
In general, the television series is very faithful to the book and all the better for it. It drifts off more at the end, and two of the last three scenes are the weakest of the series. That's not enough to ruin a brilliant series.
Movie Review: Vanity of all security
Summary: 5 Stars
This series from the BBC is probably great. Probably because it has everything it needs to be great and yet it sounds in the end a little bit sad, too slow, too obvious to be true, believable and such stories need to be believed. It is one of the most beautiful story from the Cold War, about the fable of the Russian spy inside the spying service of Her gracious British Queen. The main interest is how the service is paralyzed by inside hostilities, inside vanities, inside rivalries that kill all possible initiatives to find out who is embedded in the comfortable armchairs of that service. The secret services and spying services of any country become complacent after a while and that's the way you can infiltrate them in no time. You just have to play the superficial game of faithfulness and fidelity and orthodoxy and blind obedience, and then you can do what you want and become the best Russian spy ever. When finally someone arrives from ahigh to investigate he becomes the object and target of absolutely all hostilities and jealousies and everyone is ready to kill him if necessary, poison or handguns are best. That's the only real interest of this series. The patriotic motivations of the good spies are superficial and in fact not argument-supported at all. It is something that is considered as natural: every patriot loves his or her country and is ready to die for it. Then the motivations of the Russian spy are just as superficial, dealing with the hypocrisy of this democracy where so few people have real power and real control over the life of millions of powerless subjects who are lured by the baits of elections. Standard communist discourse from these old years of the 1950s and 1960s. The final touch is how the surveillance of this spy under custody is so loose that he can get an appointment from someone outside, get out of the building and get "liberated" by his own assassination in a peaceful park. In other words they let him organize his own final exit. Hypocrisy we were saying. It is far more shameful cynicism. But the series is played so well by so good actors. That's the best part of British TV: real actors are acting in the series and not beginners or mediocre middle aged non-entities. It is a real pleasure, even if the small screen of this medium reduces these actors to close-up shots and hardly anything else.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Movie Review: An Absolute Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Where does one start when commenting on the top echelon of film making? How about starting with the principal of this film, Sir Alec Guinness?
Honestly, cinema does not get any better than this. John Le Carre's excellent book is brought to real, gritty, desperate life by this BBC production. I've read the book (the first of Le Carre's I read, as a matter of fact), and I was curious to learn if the rich, dark, texture of the novel could be captured on film. Happily, it has been.
Loosely based upon the story of a real Soviet mole, Kim Philby, the film looks at spycraft as it must be; lots of partial information one tries to make sense of, hunches based upon a lifetime of working in the dark, engaged in a war of sorts, mainly cold, but occasionally very, very hot.
Guinness is George Smiley, one of the most famous names in fictional spycraft literature. His nemesis is Karla (played by a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart), a Soviet spy who almost matches Smiley step for step. Smiley is a retired British agent, who is asked to return to help ferret out a Soviet mole in the British secret service.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy takes you into the world of the game as it is really played (or one imagines it as such). Who do you trust? Who is on your side? Who is willing to compromise to get ahead in the bureaucracy, and who is willing to sell his country out completely? The rewards are few and fleeting, the costs heavy and sometimes overwhelming, but the game must be played for one's country, for one's duty. One perseveres and muddles on.
Full of surprises, excellent acting, great settings, and heavy on atmosphere, this is as good as it gets. Others have said that it is a bit too full of twists and turns to easily follow. Having some familiarity with the book, I didn't find it so. However, even if that is true, then just watch it again! I've seen it several times, and, as any work of art, it is full of layers and details that will reveal themselves with subsequent viewing.
MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Any chance that one has of watching a master at work, Guinness is a joy, but watch this master at the top of his craft, in a film worthy of such a performance. (BTW, the American version is 26 minutes shorter than the British version. I'm not sure what's been cut, but it seems a shame to cut a second from such a film!)