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

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

boom

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/jun/30/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-traiker

love john hurt

holy shit i am pumped for this

Probably this is going to be good (Gary Oldman and John Hurt are great), but Smiley and Guinness for me are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to imagine a different actor in that role.

true, hope they pull it off

good to see benny cumby and tom hardy reteaming

Oldman looks the part in that trailer altho he's perhaps still too good-looking to be Smiley, also I can't quite tell from the trail if it's set in period or not, some of the shots look like it is but some don't. Anyway I'm pretty sure this will rock and I demand they do the full trilogy.

it's set in ~the past~ for deffo

'it's the male bridesmaids' - a blogger who gets it

every shot looks period to me

yeah consider me stoked. looks like exactly the right tone. still hard to get my head around a non Guinness/BBC version but hey.

Definitely could work, the brief bit of the Karla interrogation scene was solid.

oldman doing his best obi-wan impression

its still set in the 1970s according to wikipedia

i just rescreened this the other week and it put me on a le carre book/movie/miniseries kick. the miniseries for a perfect spy is kinda 'eh' (though i dont love the novel as much as everyone else does); smiley's people is pretty good but not as good as this.

sick trailer btw

pretty stoked for this based on the trailer, never seen or read any le carré.

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

dude!!

excited for this!

so many craggy-looking british dudes!

new board description

haha. oldman is so good. has he really never won an oscar?

'oscar' and 'good at acting' are pretty bad predictors of ea. other

yeah, i know. just the "gary oldman BAFTA winner - colin firth academy award winner" thing at the end struck me as wrong.

Psyched for this even though it can't possibly improve upon the mini-series.

yeah, just the condensing of everything to feature length makes me nervous. but looks like they nailed the vibe, judging from the trailer.

ha i don't think his (oldman's) bafta was even for acting? the bafta best actor over the past twenty years is an almost unalloyed cavalcade of mediocrity though, c-fuzz won it for king's speech AND for a single man

xpost

i don't even mind firth, but i'm sure even he would say that oldman's the better actor.

jim in glasgow this

never seen or read any le carré.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is just crazy talk! you need to get some carré my friend

kinda can't believe i am doing trailer analysis but: the snippets of firth in this make him look great?, like it'll be a good fit for his perma-pensive face

i have also never read le carre!

and i love spy shit

Lord, man. Get reading immediately.

ned knows

the newest isn't bad at all, actually

'it's the male bridesmaids' - a blogger who gets it

:D

think my dad has all of them sitting in the book shelf as well, and i've read pretty much anything of promise in there.

Are any of these guys actually good? It’s funny how as a kid, I would see these enormous novels that just screamed EPIC to me, more ambitious appearing than the Clancy/Grisham/Ludlum stuff, you can include John Jakes and others in there as well. I had the youthful tendency to assume 800+ pages meant “smart” fiction, which is how I wound up reading Battlefield Earth as a 12 yr old haha. Anyway I assume none hold a candle to JLC.

i'm in the middle of honourable schoolboy right now, it's definitely been a bit of a slog. i enjoy the smiley scenes. i agree that westerby's scenes are pretty much unreadable, i skim and skip. as someone who lived in hong kong for a couple of years i really enjoy the geography of the city as laid out in the novel. i don't have any idea about the veracity of the characters themselves, though, having not been alive in 1965 or whenever the story's supposed to take place. i imagine it's similar in depth to 'the world of suzie wong' which i've never seen or read but just feels like it drew from the same well, yeah?

my library has informed me that i've had honourable schoolboy out for so long that it's considered to be lost. i have been fined $20, which is a little less than halfway to the threshold of $50 in fees above which i will not be able to borrow. i hope to finish the book before the end of the summer so that i can clear my name but boy jerry westerby does not make for easy reading.

it's taking place in 1975 fwiw

i liked the ascension of smiley into a being similar to control or god somewhat, you hear more of what is thought of what he says and does and doesnt than you read from his perspective and its a pleasing aspect to maybe a full third of the book as i remember it

James Clavel is a very good story teller and his books are definitely rewarding. He’s very good at spinning these very complex multi-threaded yarns; possibly too many threads at time)

There’s a lot of detail, clearly a lot of research; he was screenwriter as well and what might be a couple of seconds of establishing shot becomes five pages, he can also get a bit repetitive on points he really wants to hammer home.

On the downside - the sexism, the orientalism, albeit tempered with there always being a white saviour who embodies or learns his basic idea that ideal humans are base maximizers of profit and pleasure by adopting ‘oriental ways’.

His grasp of Asian languages is shocking and there’s a few major historical clangers - the social attitudes depicted in Shigun mainly belong to an era 50-100 hears after the one in which it is set.

Even with all those caveats - have read all of them and would read again.

Noble House (1981) is interesting in that Clavell clearly read the Karla trilogy. There’s a couple of characters that seem lifted straight from JLC. The whole espionage subplot (or is it two?), feels a bit cut and shut into the main narrative, you could probably loose it without too much impact on the rest of the book.

bbc casting a legacy of spies at present

a 70s/80s doorstop fiction thread

I love this thread idea, especially if we include 60s fiction. According to Davis' Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, the first press that could produce two-inch-thick mass market paperbacks went into operation in 1961. Soon after that, brick-shaped paperback novels started to sell in much larger numbers than hardcover editions. By the 90s, trade paperbacks ate into the rack-sized book market and the golden era of doorstop fiction came to an end.

irrc, the godfather was near the zenith of the 2" thick mass market paperback era

We may not have a thread about it all per se but we've got a couple of author threads (which I started):

James Michener

Herman Wouk

None specifically on Clavell, I think.

Although I did start this one about the original miniseries and the book:

"Shogun" -- the miniseries (but the book too if you like)

by the by... r0ger t00ze just posted a link to the pilot episode of "Mr Palfrey of Westminster" (1983). had never heard of it before!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h4q0qVCvTM

https://i.postimg.cc/QMXQPXYB/ttss.jpg