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

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

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

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.