ODD MAN OUT

www.filmmonitor.org
www.myspace.com/filmmonitor

Between the West and the East, Capitalism and Socialism, ideology and methodology, there remains the obliterated center, illuminated in the sixties by the Cold War, and discussed bluntly in Martin Ritt’s 1965 screen adaptation of John le Carre’s novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. A story of the existential crisis of the post-war West; a dark-hearted anti-epic spy thriller wrought with a direct skepticism and distrust of the bloated political systems and ideologies of the World’s burgeoning super-powers.

“Brace yourself for greatness” reads the tagline for this film. Perhaps an executive’s feeble attempt to generate ticket sales to the downer movie of the year, or perhaps a well placed bit of irony for a film based on a convoluted bit of espionage that cannot end in anything but defeatism and the absence of a hero. To brutally summarize the plot of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold: there is a washed up and drunk British spy, an intelligence agency in need of a pawn, an intelligence agency in need of intelligence, love, agents and double agents, and finally, in the end, a woman in trouble. Our aforementioned spy is Alec Leamas, acted by Richard Burton, head operator of British intelligence agents in East Germany. A self described “technician” and alcoholic, he holds no real ties to any friends or family, and only the faintest glimmer of that to his country.
After Leamas loses his last man in East Germany, he is brought in by his agency and told he should “come in from the cold,” or stay out in it if he is willing to take on a mission in which he will be used as a pawn. What is interesting in this film, as in many spy dramas, are the levels of acting present within them. Leamas must, to fulfill his new mission, act as a washed up, alcoholic spy with a disenfranchised resentment for his mother country in order to defect to East Germany posing as a flipped agent. Of course what we, the audience, know (but perhaps unbeknownst to his handlers) is that this is not much of an act for him. Leamas is the detritus of high capitalism. He is the epic hero boiled down into the technician with a task; the spy with enough inside information to acknowledge, “Communism, Capitalism, it’s the innocents that get slaughtered,” and that the great democratic hope of the West is being held in place by the same tactics they are fighting against in the East. The core political ideologies and morals no longer exist even though the power structures meant to uphold them still do (which, of course, in 1965 would have been a bit of a radical voice in comparison to the 007-duck-and-cover-under-your-school-desk-from-the-slanted-eyed-fur-cap-wearing sickle-and-hammer-carrying-bread-line-waiting-wire-tapping-red-commie-pig cultural climate).



The film’s social statement resonates deeply within our current political climate, for which the Criterion Collection should be commended for once again re-releasing such a necessary and timeless film with a load of insightful special features. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold speaks of a human society at its limit—that is, society as a system that has become so large it is beginning to enter into supernova stage. Like a dying star it has expanded so far out in its reaching that its core/center has disintegrated, creating the vacuum of a black hole, whose great gravitational pull, which although may currently be holding its pieces together, will be the end of the whole mess, colliding itself into itself until nothing is left. The film’s world is one in which there are few true ideological or methodological convictions left behind the actions of those in power. It is probably more the case that these kinds of core convictions have never existed within the realms of the powerful, only more successfully masked in ages before the age of mass communication. In the film there is the perpetuation of nations and creeds through complex systems of war, espionage, and propaganda, but what those wars are about, any epic sense of right and wrong, or nationalism based on deep connections to a motherland, are being reduced to nothing within the complexities of human society’s exponential growth.

In a world where the wars perpetuate wars, and the spy missions more spy missions, all without any real knowable cause—save for the powerful to stay powerful, which Ritt holds off screen and out of reach of his characters. The men behind the curtain in this film are as abstract and removed as the god who told Noah to build an ark. Leamas has little ideological or nationalistic beliefs, and yet he carries on with his work. It is interesting to note that it is during his mission, in his double-agent-traitorous monologues given to his East German captors, that he perhaps comes closest to the truth of his (and that of the film’s) perception of reality.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold will be released on DVD on November 25.