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

Yeah, I don't remember seeing Smiley's People! Wikipedia says Stewart was in both.

it should be michael fassbender. or the other one.

xpost

smiley's people is a bit of a letdown after TTSS

I think he's only in Smiley's People.

In the mini-series.

yes Alfred, my fave spy films are probably Our Man in Havana and The In-Laws.

has anyone seen Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?

I don't think he actually appears in the book either, but it's been years.

xp It's awesome.

he has one scene in TTSS

The Deadly Affair is unfortunately fairly weak. Don't bother with it.

xp It must be uncredited cuz he's not in IMDB.

which of the two series has the flashback where Smiley (Guinness w/ a dye job) is talking to Stewart in a cell?

xxxp: that's the one, right?

And I think he only has one scene in Smiley's People.

it's been years since I've watched The Spy Who Came In...; perhaps too dour for its own good. But Burton has his best role after George in WAOVW?

iMdB does not always have complete credits. And maybe PS was uncredited cuz he doesn't say anything?

both series are on PS's page:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001772/

hope karla is in the new one. could be a secret cameo or s.thing. at least in the miniseries it's pretty important.

it's a pretty big part of TTSS (the book) -- can't see how they would leave it out?

it'll probably be shia lebeauoffff

patrick stewart plays karla in a flashback scene in the original tv series, but has no lines--smiley is telling guillam about the one time he met karla, in an indian prison. as in the miniseries, he doesnt "appear" in the book except in that story

I see Stephen Rea in the new film's credits, with no character name!

A slow percolating thought as well which is probably applicable to Le Carre's work as a whole is how little he evinces any interest in the general trappings of the regimes in question. Using Tinker Tailor as an explicit example, the most there is of an English structure as personified/incorporated is the figure of the Minister above Lacon, who is a cameo at best, as well as 'Whitehall' as general point of reference. Similarly both the Americans and Russians are discussed in generalities and the broadest of strokes. In part this approach is understandably contextual (why bother explaining what is already apparent), but, especially as history does change even in the short term, it reduces all the public faces of the regimes to grey, irrelevant background, with the logic of the systems themselves being the only driving force, as previously noted on the thread. If it reminds me of anything it's almost Orwell and 1984, only without even a Big Brother figure as a prop.

Peter Morgan is an exec producer on this film, which explains why bloody David Frost is in it.

different one! that was a head-scratcher.

there are two David Frosts?! What a plague.

xp

there is a little more than the logic of the systems tho, which is represented (to Smiley at least) by Karla. Smiley may not be able to articulate what it is that he's working to protect, but Karla is the personification of what he's protecting it from. that single meeting, and Smiley's humiliation by Karla - which perhaps he has never overcome, and which perhaps is more painful and formative than anything Ann does to him - comes to define the difference between Us and Them in his head. to Smiley at least, Karla is the monstrous product of a system that must be monstrous itself. how much the author or the reader shares that assumption may vary.

i wd say that The Honourable Schoolboy as a novel makes me question le Carre's detachment and sophistication a fair bit.

There's a logic to Karla's personification as you describe; at the same time he's not some Blofeld/Fu Manchu type but somebody equally beholden to his own bureaucratic ups and downs, falling out of favor with Moscow at points and ultimately creating his own private empire precisely to shield himself. Granted if the distinction between the systems is that one side fires/forcibly retires you when you screw up and the other one wonders whether shooting you or the gulag is better then your point is clear and I'd say you're correct that ultimately Smiley, however frustrated he is with much of his system, ultimately 'illusionless,' is immovable from a perhaps reflexive defense of a certain England -- or alternately a certain idealized English/aesthetic existence (his German poets, etc.; the bit of art crit that sneak in throughout the novel add to that function) -- as opposed to a seemingly unknowable set of concerns. (Which makes Smiley's People of interest in that it ultimately, contextually and more, 'humanizes' Karla, just.)

i think it starts off as 'Karla won't/is incapable of "playing the game"' and winds up at his having something of the nature of a very sophisticated machine in Smiley's imagination - his motivations, his calculations, are just about logically explicable to Smiley but the world that created him isn't? Smiley seems to have much less trouble understanding the mole for example, and as such his emotional attitude is clearer.

Then again, wouldn't that be the case, that we know something closer to home no matter what home is.

I wonder if time hasn't changed our thoughts about Russia as 'the other' in turn. Growing up in the seventies and well into the eighties I seemed to only hear about Russia as this place literally shut off from everything and weirdly isolated, a classic perception of trying to fit in a consistent take on a place with little experience to hand; for many Le Carre readers alive at that time it was probably similar. Of course Russia as place or as regime doesn't directly appear in the book at all, everything is at most secondhand.

compare his semi-loving portraits of south-east Asia in Honourable Schoolboy. which are part of the thing that makes that book feel more Boy's Own adventure and less cool distanced dissection.

time has undoubtedly changed our thoughts about Russia but only into a different kind of "other" i guess

Yeah stepping back to Honourable that one is a strange cul-de-sac and I'll be happy to not revisit it, as those issues and more all sound like they'll just swamp it completely.

A different other, a different...context. Who is the le Carre of today and could there be one? There's plenty of room for it I figure but the stakes and cultural contexts are surely shifted.

Would the le Carre of today necessarily write about espionage? I tend to think not, actually, and my attention turns somewhere like Mieville.

one thought: today's spooks are engaged in a much less insular game, primarily working to undermine enemies with less qualms about killing civilians. the job is less arcane in this respect?

there's little to no Ireland in le Carre that i can remember. is that because a) different department or b) literary/other reasons?

xpost -- Mieville is actually who I was thinking of earlier in terms of vague points of thematic comparison so I'm glad I wasn't alone!

isn't le carre the le carre of today?

(haven't read any of his recent books but they sound solid from reviews/interviews)

looks like the whole Ricky Tarr subplot is going to be a biggish chunk of the film judging from that last trailer. that's what i was hoping for; it's clearly (in the mini series) the most glamorous, Bond style action movie element of the story. gonna be great this!

xpost -- Fair point! I do wonder how much of that might be lingering affection; at the same time you'd think that an even more morally grey world would be up his creative alley by default.

i don't really want TTSS to be glamorous or Bond-style tbh

I'm not worried about that, exactly? To me, the irreducible piece of the story is about disaffection and the semi-conjugal relationship between an employer (gov't) and an unenthusiastic functionary (Smiley) of that employer. In other words, I think TTSS exists in the space between ironic detachment and lingering affection.

FWIW I thought 'Let the Right One In' was a sad hash of a movie, and wasted the heck out of Michael Nyqvist.

the american version was better

nonetheless this film looks tite

i didnt think LTROI was "all that" but i have a hard time believing this guy can make a bad movie with that cast

i agree max. i think the source material is interesting enough (both as le carre intended it, and as a cultural artifact) to carry the movie a long way. i wonder what a contemporary version of 'spy who came in from the cold' would look like, too?

i reread TSWCIFTC recently. a LOT less editorializing than you got later. really dry. doubt you could improve on the original film.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/26/article-1062713-0002CCDB00000258-980_468x352.jpg

^^^ beautiful composition in this movie

yeah after rereading both SWCIFTC and TTSS this summer i think the the spy who is the better book. so cold!

http://imageshack.us/f/849/tinker1.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/f/545/tinker3.jpg/

Promising review for sure, some of the specific details in particular.

Watched The Spy Who Came In ... on TV the other day, and it is one of the most perfect spy movies, because it's so unremittingly downbeat. None of the other big name attempts at "realist" spy movies in the 60s ever allowed themselves to be so unglamorous. (Although Richard Burton? Hmmm. Well, I guess you need a star, but he's no one's idea of an upper-mid-level bureaucrat.) Brilliant supporting cast - Michael Hordern, in the picture above, is perfect as the gay agent.

And, the way power games are played, they way everyone dismisses the person immediately below them at the first opportunity: Robert Hardy dismisses Hordern; the first East German agent dismisses Hardy; Fiedler dismisses the first East German agent. Each of those scenes is pretty well identitcal, and perfect for it: beneath it all, everyone is just a jealous jobworth.

that's funny that that's Michael Hordern; I mistook him for Noel Coward!