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

now the bbc series

It's good? Yeah?

incredible

every winter I break out the DVD set of the bbc series and just work through it. so great.

Probably my most rewatched series DVD.

Is the BBC series of a Perfect Spy any good?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZgTRl3lj78

if you find that this type of thing is the type of thing you like etc

if anyone is looking for an "american version" of TTSS, david quammen's "the soul of viktor tronko" is a fictionalized version of the yuri nosenko defection and very good and readable in a le carre kind of way

also i re-read the looking glass war and i take back it being boring. i mean its boring in the way le carre is boring, and its very overdramatic at the end, too much oh the humanity as people complain about upthread, but it gets the dilapidated upper middle class bureaucrats stuff really well

watched movie again, thread was too harsh on it imo

liked it a lot; but haven't read book or seen series so most of thread discussion on it = ?, shrug

seven part BBC series.

go on, now. I'll wait.

ok. hold on, shdn't take me long

uh that was three minutes ago you were told

watched the movie again too. have seen it half a dozen times now i think. if i have nits to pick it's only because it is less good than the novel or TV series - it's fine as a movie tho. weirdly the pace of it feels a lot faster now than when i saw it in the cinema, lot of abrupt scene jumps

yeah agreed on rewatch.

...brb...

getting ready for my annual rescreen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCm3IrscqH8

Tom Hardy wishes he was Hywel Bennett every day of his life

watched the bbc series of this for the first time y'day mainly due to the praise given to it by dmac and NV. my word it was a terrific way to spend a saturday. halfway through smiley's people today. good work guys.

It's awesome to me that there are still people experiencing this 36 year old tv miniseries for the first time. Glad you enjoyed it!

Rah but iirc it was this thread and NV pointed me the way of the BBC version also

It is so brilliant, one of the most perfectly conceived tv series in history. But no way does Ricki Tarr turn into early 90's Shelley :(

mini series is so classic and i think also the least sexualized piece of art ever produced

Watched episode six today, opens with Smiley meeting Jerry Westerby (Joss Ackland) - who had voiced suspicions a year earlier - at the bar. Smiley brings them back up. Anyway, there's something almost unbearably great about these meetings in TTSP - people feeling out each other, or rather people feeling out Smiley, playing at jolly old fellows, stuck up sceptics - soon enough opening up and giving him what he wants, or at least some honest truth. There's talk, nervous ticks and smiles - and at the end you're nearly almost left with the feeling you watched the performance of some thoroughly lonely, hollowed thing, grasping for any companionship. And you chuckle and you tear up. And Ackland does so much here in just the first few minutes.

Yeah Auckland really males an impression in his few scenes

anyone watching the night manager?

something with both Tom Hiddleston + Hugh Laurie in it? I'd end putting my head through the television.

o nice gon check it out

The Night Manager recap: episode one – as sexy and sumptuous as TV gets

It’s got revolution, respectful sex and a hospitality professional who looks set to thwart international arms dealing without even dislodging his tie pin. No wonder it’s the spy thrillers that get the big budgets

yeah surprisingly into it

will watch any le carre adaptation

I watched the movie for the first time, and while I really liked it, one thing bugged me a lot... I haven't read the book, so maybe it's better explained there? What I'm talking about is how Smiley figures out what the whole Polyakov/Witchcraft thing really is (a setup by Karla) and what it's ultimate goal is (to feed false intel to Americans that gets "confirmed" as genuine by MI6). He seems confident enough in his theory to get angry at the minister (his superior) who still believes in Witchcraft, yet we never see him discovering any evidence that would make him suspect Polyakov is anything else than what Alleline thinks he is. Sure, once he finds out the mole has been in contact with Polyakov, it becomes evident that Polyakov is a triple agent, because otherwise the mole would've informed on him to Karla, and the whole Witchcraft operation would've ended. But Smiley makes his grand statement to the minister before the scene where we find out all four mole suspects know who Polyakov is and are in regular contact with him. (Previously it was implied only Alleline knew who was behind Witchcraft; if Smiley presumed that this was the case, and Alleline wasn't the mole, then the mole wouldn't have been able to burn Polyakov.)

loved NGHTMGR

Yeah it was great despite a couple of plotting clangers that can probably be attributed to Le Carre not really understanding modern technology.

Even allowing for the alarm system, it was a bit weird that Roper kept his top secret arms documents in an unlocked desk drawer when he was fully capable of getting a safe.

no cameras anywhere in mallorca either, but hey

So I watched the BBC series, and liked it immensely, though it didn't really answer the question I asked above: how does Smiley figure out what Witchcraft really is? We never really see him uncovering any evidence towards that, so I guess we're supposed to think it's an educated guess, but it seems he's taking a huge risk based on that guess, making the Circus leaders + the Minister + anyone else who believed in Witchcraft look like fools.

There's one little detail that bugged me in the TV series: the small oil painting at Smiley's house. When Haydon visits Smiley's home, he comments that the painting wasn't there before, and Smiley says he bought it recently, and Haydon says he likes it a lot. And then in the final episode, when it's all over, there's a scene where Smiley is looking at the painting pensively. It seems to me the painting was some kind of signifier for the Smiley/Haydon/Ann triangle drama, but was the more than that to it? I couldn't quite see what the painting depicted (some kind of a pastoral scene?), is it a well-known image or something?

It was a painting of witchcraft being a setup

Lol!

did haydon paint the painting

I think in the book it's a group of pottery figures representing a love triangle?

the painting is a Corot iirc but there's nothing more specific than that - its only signification is that it's expensive as a gift from Anne?

The point where Smiley is able to link Witchcraft and the rotten apple is only dramatically explicit in the book (it's a great moment of realisation, the bit where everything unfolds for Smiley), implicit in the TV and missed entirely in the film i think. it's the thing that bothers me most with the adaptations, because it's critical how Smiley gets there: detection through paperwork. I can't remember the details of the book reasoning.

I see that someone asked this same question on the IMDb forum for the series, and here's how someone else answered it:

The business with Tarr and Merlin is complicated, and it’s easy to miss its significance.

• After Tarr flees Lisbon and hides out in Marseilles, Karla is desperate to shut him up. After using Witchcraft to discredit him at the Circus, Karla sends people to look for Tarr.

• Tarr, realizing that he’s being looked for, decides it’s time to come in from the cold. In order to protect his daughter and his daughter’s mother, he sets up a diversion: He secures travel bookings to London for them in the name of “Poole,” to match his own false identity, which he knows is blown. He then gives them the false Swiss papers that he had on him when he went to Lisbon and sends them to an entirely different destination. At this point, the only people in the world who associate the “Poole” travel bookings with Tarr are the Russians.

• In Guillam’s meeting with Alleline et al, he learns that Merlin is relating the “Poole/Tarr family to London” story to the Circus as a way of further discrediting him before he gets to anyone at the Circus. This draws a direct line between Merlin and Karla.

The rest of it is a result of Smiley’s reading of the history of Witchcraft, and his realization from that of how Witchcraft serves the needs of Moscow Centre. While this is the subject of an entire chapter of the novel, the whole thing is explained in a single brief scene in the TV series, and not at all in the recent film. It’s not really surprising that it wasn’t really clear.

The person wrote this is correct that it's not very clear in the series, and not explained at all in the movie. There's no scene where Smiley would connect all these dots, so his claim that Witchcraft is linked to the mole seems to come out of nowhere.

Do we have a thread on Night Manager?

They did a good job on it, despite/because/whatever studding it with big star actors and glamming it up

still no thread afaik but I'm watching it now on AMC and enjoying it

(The Night Manager, that is)

good menswear

pvmic

although the scene in the most recently aired episode had hiddleston's character being sized up by a tailor and the dimensions read off made me think, damn that is one fit dude

I think it was like 41" chest, 32" waist

All fine attributes for modelling men's underwear and boat racing season, but not significant qualities in a half decent actor.