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

ty, it seems like the kind of film that is given away free w the daily mail on a regular basis so i will scour the charity shops for a copy

dude... where eagles dare.

i've never seen the film version of Spy Who Came in From the Cold - any good? has richard burton EVER been in a good movie?

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, September 7, 2011 9:45 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

a) yeah it's great b) what tammy said

oh yeah duh forgot where eagles dare, even ingrid pitt is gd in that

i seem to remember reading a v sniffy piece in private eye abt that big, recent 900 page secret service history that woof and ned mention - sounded p compromised/'official', from what i recall. in the 80s (and earlier) you'd often see bestsellery bks abt MI5etc by ppl w wonderful names like Chapman Pincher and Fenton Bresler, wonder who (if anybody) are their equivs today (haven't really 'kept up' w/ the genre)

a v sniffy piece in private eye

surely not

i remember my dad bringing a copy of this back from his travels, seemed awfully exciting

nb i have never read it

copies of spycatcher actually add up to greater biomass than human beings at this point

a perfect spy is not the best english novel since the war

that would be the satan bug

Julie Burchill's Ambition imo

i think you're all forgetting a little something called The Rats

i dunno i think Lair is probly stronger also i was only half kidding about Julie B

Le Carre movie adaptations are a good thread.

I like in descending order:

The Russia House
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Tailor of Panama
Little Drummer Girl

never seen russia house; have no will ever to see drummer girl

gave tailor of panama a bad review in S&S -- i loved the tailoring (marking up and cutting) in the opening shots, which i assume was not being done by geoffrey rush's hands: it's now the only thing i can remember

spy who came in is good though: kitchen sink, really, except not set in the north obv

i read "the perfect spy" but remember nothing WHATEVER about it

and to continue my liveblog of TTSS:

after the school opening and the martindale exposition, the three successive actual-real thriller sections are pretty flawless: the tarr debrief, guillam cases the circus, and smiley visits connie -- there's a lot of storytelling going on in the first and the last, the only time this falters, as noted, is when tarr's reading irina's journal, he tells his own story well but jlc can't find a plausible written voice for her; and the connie section is probably one of the best things her ever wrote (maybe why he tried to top it in smiley's people); guillam in the circus is actually really a way to introduce the opposition as real people, the mcguffin to get him there is negligeable, and meant to be

i'm halfway through smiley's research-and-memory binge now, less successful i'd say, though it pulled one stunt of "reading so deep you forget where you are and being reminded of your surroundings with a start", where smiley does this and jlc causes you to as well, that was neat -- the setting, the crappy little hotel near paddington, is two notches too cartoonish and mimsy

haha i am actually sick of the ann counter-plot already

"there's a lot of storytelling going on" -- haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

I haven't read the Le Carre novel on which it's based but except for its stupid ending (which I can't even remember), The Tailor of Panama is good nasty fun.

i'd look up my review but that room has no working lightbulbs at the moment

think i tried to watch that as 'a john boorman film' which was probably the wrong way in

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rEEjjIEeZFA/SMXo2VuSf_I/AAAAAAAAACk/0maUZiPz1po/s400/zardoz+head.jpg

"the gun is good, the penis is evil"

haha i like some of boorman's films a lot, but that^^^ will always come to mind first

ugh

has richard burton EVER been in a good movie?

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, September 7, 2011 9:45 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L-9YmI0V1c

it was only when i listened to the boorman commentary track on the Zardoz DVD that i found out where the title comes from - (wi)zard(of)oz!

wha? im p sure it's in the movie. he goes to a library and sees the book

great movie imo

"there's a lot of storytelling going on" -- haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

― mark s, Thursday, September 8, 2011 12:48 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah. i think 'small town in germany' is the most 'and then he met x who told him y'. but this has a bit of it.

anyway, i think the novel makes it a lot more abt prideaux, not just by starting with him, but by making his debrief to smiley sorta the climax. big build-up, and it goes on for a minute. by reordering the sequence -- we know what happened to prideaux from the jump -- the novel makes it less about prideaux's personal betrayal by gerald. going to watch series again though.

i like ASTIG though. kinda like a david peace who doesn't suck.

haha will have to rescreen zardoz, maybe i was distracted by connery's codpiece

can't really get behind equus as a good movie, btw - ts: anthony shaffer vs peter shaffer

it is a treat to have mark s liveblogging TTSS, also

Reading some of the stuff about TTSS, and the nods that Smiley - though loyal, and diligent – is suffused with a sense of distaste and guilt about the whole game reminded me about The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, where - as an incidental character - he is responsible (albeit perhaps inadvertently) for the betrayal and eventual death of Nan. In TSWCIFTC he's still very much part of the machine – though it's never referred in the Smiley trilogy, maybe his role in Nan's death haunts him.

Equus is an unnecessary filming of a middling play, true. Zulu is good, obv, as is Virginia Woolf and Villain and probly Absolution if you're in the mood.

Prideaux is Le Carre's good chap to contrast to all the shifty bounders - maybe including Smiley - in the rest of the novel. I suspect Le Carre thinks he's the hero in some ways, but at least he comes across as kinda decent, unlike Westerby in The Honourable Schoolboy who occupies the same role but is mostly a fucking dick imo.

the one time i tried to watch Villain it was interrupted by the start of the first gulf war!

i've been wrong so often on this thread i hesitate to ask but - burton is zulu??

i also forgot abt the medusa touch, which has some of the some atmos as the tv version of TTSS, funnily enough - britain on the cusp of thatcherism, resigned middle aged men in suits, london as a place of emptiness (morally, geographically)

nah Burton's not Zulu i've just mixed him up with Stanley Baker in my head, common mistake round our way. pretty sure Baker did a movie on similar lines to Villain that's superior, too

Not "The Criminal", the title's similar but the film isn't!

Probberly "Robbery"?

think it might be Robbery yeah

yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you) (albeit largely as cover): we know that something happened to him, not exactly what yet [as of p.162] except he was shot in the shoulder in czecho <-- smiley doesn't really know much of it at this point [p.162] either

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is: obviously i've known for something like 30 years -- jlc treats him with kids gloves AND lampshade hangs wildly all about him; that's to say smiley is overly bothered in effect by how the story is treating gerald (this is largely what bothers me about the ann stuff i think: the extent to which it's ONLY distractional sleight-of-hand -- one thing guinness manages no better than jlc is making the smiley-ann marriage remotely believable, actually, even tho siân phillips makes ann believable; in a sense we keep reading i suspect because we want to crack this mystery, but are left basically clueless) (as clueless as smiley, yes, DO YOU SEE, but that's a bullshit move, really )

the entire novel is smiley's atonement for the death of nan, yes: a long and elaborate proof that nothing nasty he ever formerly had responsibility for was actually really his fault, it is all totally at karla's door

All the way through the tv show, right up to the last episode, I presumed Ann was going to turn out to be some elaborate beard :/

haha elaborate beard = zardoz.jpg <-- if boorman had filmed it

re proof: trust the tale not the teller: jlc/smiley is convinced by his own argument, i think, but the reader -- attentive to the situational method, when it's on and when it's flawed - is not

you're quite right that Ann as a character and Smiley's relationship with her is pretty badly handled, it hadn't occured to me that this might be just cos she's a structural device. JLC wants to deepen Smiley more than he achieves it perhaps.

tailor of panama is as alfred describes

btw, le carre writes a little bit about the philby connection in the introduction to the most recent (american?) edition of the book--you can see on google books here: http://goo.gl/zerJ5

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http://k.minus.com/jb14yaPGkw8YsD.png

yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you)

Yeah, pretty much -- but it is telling he's told about/talked about through the eyes of an impressionable and desperate-for-connection awkward kid. That's about the only kind of character who could outright adore him.

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is

As mentioned above I was glad I'd forgotten who it was, and though I had a pretty sure idea at some point it wasn't locked down -- and I was too happily lost in the general machinations to worry further.

haha one of the suspects -- will try and keep hans moleman's REAL NAME redacted for ned -- refers to the relevant americans as "puritan fascists" = a pretty good description of the deeply lunatic angleton

has anyone itt read HARLOT'S GHOST? <--- n.mailer on much the same territory

yeah i read Harlot's Ghost when it came out, was never certain whether Mailer intended a sequel and fervently hoped he didn't. it's one of Mailer's best imo, and the obliquity of the narrator's experiences, his permanent exclusion from the meaning of any of his work, is better than JLC's Sherlock-isms i think, tho i prefer le Carre's milieu and his characters and his style, mostly.

just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW -- this is even better than the first one, because it's all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn't meant to know

i'm not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute-playing hippie gf -- perhaps bcz the gap between michael jayston's version and jlc's renders his inner life somewhat wonky (this is much less true in smiley's people, where jlc had once again adapted the character to its on-screen portrayal, and guillam is married with a kid in paris) -- but these scenes are tremendous for nerves, tension, not knowing what will happen next etc, someone interloping in a very familiar space, having to seem who he ordinarily is when he no longer is, being himself (very aware that he's out-of-the-loop and appropriately testy about it, yet at the same time not so capable they spot he knows something he oughtn't) (a modelled microcosm of HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN'S inner life, in fact; nice work)

the section before, smiley plunging deeper and deeper into the files, woke up towards the end when he moves off reminiscence into parsing actual secret files he'd never before viewed: finally being a desk-bound research agent, intelligence office as historian-critic, if you like, picking up clues via finance, location and his target suddenly becoming human and throwing a long-ago-and-far-off tantrum

by the way did anybody see David Hare's Page Eight the other week cos I was away from ILX and i desperately wanted to know if anybody else thought it was a bit pish

'Stuff Happens' by David Hare.

scroll down a bit

(xp) Me. Pish seconded.

during his reminiscences, smiley actually develops a THEORY about HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN, the person who will turn out to be the mole, not that smiley realises this yet (OR DOES HE?) and how moleman relates to all those around (genderspoiler) him -- that they're all botched copies of him, and that he can only be himself jigsawed out of all those round him... and actually guillam, in thought and behaviour under foe's gaze in the circus, seems to attest to the accuracy of the theory, at least re situational judgment and self-handling and stance (he's being very junior squishy smiley inside, re his gf)

again: nice work, there's a lot of "hall of mirrors" stuff art work here, which is the intelligence world philby and angleton created

xp hare is pish incarnate