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

bland is the working-class professor who uses his left-wing credentials as a way to recruit students in the eastern bloc

I'm starting to wonder which of you nerdz is the mole.

we all done it, guvnor

nah tho, for all it's fun to nerd out on the details i still think this is mostly a pretty meditation on emptiness and isolation and the horror of office jobs

ilx?

Man, the betrayal goes all the way to Smiley's conjugal bed

LOL, goole

i think goole may be onto something

noize board = scalphunters imo

pavement artists more like

a few interesting thoughts on the two adaptations:

There is another way the basic material has dated. Karla is considered a genius spymaster, smarter than anybody else in the business. Again, according to one Internet source (yes, I am getting into the epistemology of the Internet, but when better to do it than with the really epistemological world of intelligence gathering?), Karla was based on a specific Russian spymaster. Maybe so, but in the novel, miniseries, and film he is a superspy and infallible. The novel was written in the early '70s in the middle of the Cold War. The western spy services assumed the Soviet spy services were better than ours. We now know they weren’t. After the collapse of the Soviet regime, much, how shall we say, information in the KGB files found its way to the West, and boy, while we thought MI6 and the CIA were a bunch of cock-ups, the Soviets had them all beat. For example, for two years in World War II, the KGB was convinced that the Cambridge Five had to be British plants because the information they were getting was too good. So now we find it a bit hard to believe that “Karla” was all that great at his job. (A lot of information about this comes from a fascinating book I recently finished wading through called Defend the Realm: An Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrews, the leading British historian of intelligence. A warning to you: it’s 850 pages and it is not a quick read.)

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/03/understanding-screenwriting-90-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-the-adventures-of-tintin-contraband-and-more

Interesting reading. This is a good opportunity to show my love for this poster:

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0ihbeP1pP1qzdglao1_500.jpg

i think the paragraph before that is more otm:

We also do not get to know the five people in the Circus that Smiley and the late Control suspect of being the mole as well as we do in the miniseries, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The basic story of Tinker Tailor was inspired by the “Cambridge Five,” as their Russian spymasters called them. They had positions of varying degrees of power in various branches of British intelligence from the late '30s on, and the Brits only began to suspect something was up in the late '40s. Three of the Five defected to Moscow, two in the early '50s, one in the early '60s. At least one source on the Internet suggests that one of the Five had revealed to Moscow that David Cornwell was working for British intelligence. Cornwell left the intelligence service, took a pen name and began writing espionage novels as John le Carré. In the novel and miniseries of Tinker Tailer we get a lot of detail about the five suspects, and more discussion of why the traitor among them was seduced by Communism in the '30s. There is almost nothing of that in the film, and I suspect that is because at this late date the idea that smart men would have believed in Communism may not work for contemporary audiences.

not getting that context across was a bit of a misstep, along with the line about fanatics always 'concealing a hidden doubt' or whatever. movie's two biggest flaws are its conception of the smiley character (the movie humanizes him, but doesn't convince you that he's a human being - hes probably a replicant) and not fleshing out hayden enough. but i still think its a hell of a picture. mark strong is so good in it that i wish he'd get some more non-badguy roles

I agree -- Mark Strong was so good in this it made me sad that he is usually cast as the villain because he's capable of a lot more.

nnn. le carre doesn't really do a good job of realizing other belief systems than british bureaucracy.

also (important news for americans): the authorized history of mi5 was massively slated on release here, for exactly the reasons you'd expect an authorized history of a country's espionage service to be slated. though you wouldn't expect someone who'd write a phrase like " I still consider that one of the two or three best miniseries. Ever." to be smart enough to pick up on that. (also not realising that Bill Haydon's sexual orientation wasn't an invention of the filmmakers.)

yeah, the number of writers who are dense on/have forgotten the queer stuff is amazing.

did you see this, thom

p

i totally disagree, i think both smiley and hayden are perfectly fleshed out in the movie

it's perfectly pitched—any more than what we get would be too much

and ya, the queer stuff is such an important part of the movie—to the point where alfredsson basically hands it to u on a platter at the end—it's crazy how many ppl seem to have totally missed it

i didnt say smiley wasnt fleshed out enough - hes just poorly conceived. he's this repressed, completely internal robot. in the mini he actually had conversations with people, in the movie anytime someone asks him a question he just stares at them until they go 'oh... i suppose you're right' - its just such an absurd exaggeration of whats needed to convey that this guy is calculating and intelligent, and it borders on parodic

regarding hayden, they do a good job getting across certain things about him in an economical way, but he isnt really characterized at all. you really get no sense of the esteem in which he's held by the rest of the circus, which diminishes the effect when he's unveiled

how is he more 'repressed' than in the series? it's all there dude...

you really see no difference in how the character is represented? the repression is all there is in the movie!

obv the miniseries gives it a lot more room to breathe, but there are plenty of scenes in the movie where smiley's feelings and emotions are pretty plain—the xmas party, the last scene with haydon, the scene with toby. he's a restrained—i guess repressed?—character but that is far from all the movie shows of him.

i felt like Alec Guiness' portrayal conveyed more warmth. His face was more expressive.

u just had subliminal memories of obi-wan

yah i saw this, adep. i liked several minutes of it.

i dont know if i saw any warmth (i'd say he was colder than oldman actually), but yeah more expressive. and it's still a restrained, almost minimalist performance, but he's playing a more credible character

obv the miniseries gives it a lot more room to breathe, but there are plenty of scenes in the movie where smiley's feelings and emotions are pretty plain—the xmas party, the last scene with haydon, the scene with toby. he's a restrained—i guess repressed?—character but that is far from all the movie shows of him.

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Monday, March 12, 2012 3:30 PM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark

right, and the reason those moments are effective is because it's a rare crack in the armor. in the first episode of the show, we see smiley being constantly made to look impotent, and see his frustration and disillusionment in the car conversation with guillam. in the movie, guillam asks george about ann and he does the gaze-ahead-like-a-zombie thing and we cut to the meeting with lacon. and the movie keeps hitting that note over and over. right off the bat, the movie is defining the smiley character differently, for better or worse. so i don't get "it's all there" - cuz it aint

http://hustongrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wimpy3.jpg

haha i think ward posted that upthread.

i think its possible i really just liked the last few shots. i feel like the filmmakers would do a better job w/ 'smileys people', somehow, maybe.

how does guillam feel, working for smiley? working for someone, yet, that working for whom requires his sitting, in a wimpy, wearing a suit, eating with a knife and fork?

i think yr right that the film privileges a blank exteriority for no good reason, or because it mistakes that for constituting a style

wimpy is obv about the worst example imaginable but i think i stand by that

how does guillaum feel? well the scene where he SITS ALONE SOBBING AT HIS PAINFUL SACRIFICE probably indicates something of that, that didnt seem too blank to me

i think it's pretty phenomenal how the movie has pretty much the same... character, pacing and tone as smiley himself

and i dont see how it needs to show his impotence any more than it does... we already see him disgraced, fired, and cuckolded, i think we are pretty good on that score

how does guillam feel, working for smiley? working for someone, yet, that working for whom requires his sitting, in a wimpy, wearing a suit, eating with a knife and fork?

also, how does that one shot not tell you all that already?

i'm sorry i hurt you

you dont get it, you hurt yourself

a blank exteriority

Like most whodunnits, it really doesn't matter much whodunnit in this, which I just saw. It's well directed and acted, which is all that counts, I suppose. I was put off by the make-up, of all things, which made everyone look like creepy perfect-skin mannequins.

So, finally saw this -- good watch, first time through I felt it was more admirable than great but a second viewing helped tease out some moments a bit more. Also I think the first time through I was getting my head around the various elisions and shifts from the book/miniseries (took me a second to realize that the Jerry Westerby character in the film is actually the duty officer character but with Westerby's name).

Surprised nobody's seemed to have said anything about the music yet? Not the original score so much, which I think was half OTM half unnecessary, but music as a theme is constant throughout -- the occasional contemporary pop drop-ins, George Formby's "Oh Mr. Wu," and that soundtracking of the final minutes to Julio Iglesias's reworking of Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGcp3_OT2-0

I liked how the soundtrack wasn't all suspensey. Also no idea why they chose the Iglesias (live!) track but it works great. Also it's La Mer, which Beyond the Sea was based on

I really liked Oldman's interpretation of Smiley.

The only thing that bothered me at first was how Mad Men-y it felt with the way it was shot, like all very pleased with its furnishings and interiors and period details and I was like uggggghhhh is this going to be furniture porn

but i got over that pretty quickly. Didn't much care for Firth, who seemed really not to act at all but just be his usual self...but everyone else was great.

Also it's La Mer, which Beyond the Sea was based on

Ah, got it, wasn't sure which direction it went. A great use of music, all this lush French chattiness and sweeping style and everything over images of crushed people and Smiley perversely triumphant.

Bordwell did a follow up post, BTW:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/20/tinker-tailor-once-more-tradecraft/

Also I'm amused by this interview just because of the photo -- damn does Alfredsson look out of place:

http://smhttp.14409.nexcesscdn.net/806D5E/wordpress-live/images/TTSS.jpg

reading Mailer's Harlot's Ghost at the moment makes me wonder what an adaptation would be like.

i don't think it wd be a good idea

btw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mer_(song)