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

i feel like in the Le Carre world, many characters have that aspect

the miniseries is atmospheric but it does suffer in a non-charming way from bbc ca.1980 production values.

i think in some ways i prefer the movie. but although oldman is not ... miscast ... he's totally forgettable (i guess that's deliberate via acting)

https://electricliterature.com/ranking-every-john-le-carr%C3%A9-adaptation-82b1532d001f

ok but he gets the One Massive Big Thing he needs to get right (and that's what smiley spots and it's why he knows the things he knows that deems couldn't work out why he knows them)

(not least: if tarr had in fact been the tar-baby that karla sent to smoke out merlin, they'd have picked someone who was less of a fuckup)

it does suffer in a non-charming way from bbc ca.1980 production values

sir our friendship ends here

i kinda feel like the forgettable quality gets at the essence of Smiley and that type of figure in Le Carre's work. I mean, in terms of espionage, you want to be forgettable, you don't want the enemy to be able to read you, think you are significant, or remember much about you, in order to avoid capture.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*luLXOCVtodcB3MvHRl359A.png

me and my pals goofin off

I was just thinking, WTF happened to Tomas Alfredson anyway? Then I remembered lol The Snowman

oof yeah that was a rough landing :(

I agree w/you on Tarr getting the info and he’s not a completely unresourceful amateur, but he winds up in way over his head and thoroughly unprepared for the enemy coming at him, which is at odds with the suavity and confidence he exhibits in the early going. All he can do at a certain point is escape and sneak back into England.

I think sarahell gets at that point a bit too, Ricki is a bit flashy and reckless when he should be a bit more low key.

bold who does it best:

PRIDEAUX: Ian Bannen vs Mark Strong (tie)
CONTROL: Alexander Knox vs John Hurt
SMILEY: Alec Guiness vs Gary Oldman
ALLELINE: Michael Aldridge vs Toby Jones
ESTERHASE: Bernad Hepton vs David Dencik
BLAND: Terrance Rigby vs Ciaran Hinds
HAYDON: Ian Richardson vs Colin Firth (tie)
CONNIE SACHS: Beryl Reid vs Kathy Burke
GUILLAM: Michael Jayston vs Benedict Cumberbatch
WESTERBY: Joss Ackland vs Stephen Graham
LACON: Anthony Bate vs Simon McBurney
TARR: Hywell Bennett vs Tom Hardy (tie)
IRINA: Susan Kodicek vs Katrina Vasilieva
MENDEL: George Sewell vs Roger Lloyd Pack

in the movie some of these roles had very little to do

I mean, it's up there with ranking best portrayals of "Henchman #3" in Die Hard movies

if there were a die hard tv series in which they were permitted to spread their wings yes

hepton is the main flaw in the TV SP i think

i don't really agree re hinds vs rigby but the character is such an unsketched nullity even in the book that it's mainly bcz i think i took against some character hinds played in something

sure! but like Bland's part in the movie was the equivalent of Henchman #3 in a Die Hard movie

lol i think it's the villain in lara croft: tomb raider – the cradle of life

xp

fuck that guy

GUILLAM: Michael Jayston vs Benedict Cumberbatch

but this, yes, yes, yes

As in Jayston was way better

word. that comparison really brings home how uncharismatic cumberbatch is (in everything).

I think when I initially saw the casting, I had hoped Cumberbatch would play Ricky Tarr or Percy -- like, he's fine being a smug prat that gets his comeuppance

joss ackland is so perfectly cast, and i'd watch him read the phonebook. not sure he'd have been able to sustain it for a miniseries of the honorable schoolboy though.

it's year since i read honourable schoolboy -- bcz it's not very good -- but iirc westerby comes across quite a lot younger than someone ackland could reasonably play

(i think the character is written somewhat ambiguously agewise and lecarre felt he could spin him out into something where he definitively was younger)

Jayston's performance has a great balance of competence and casual blending in with hidden wariness vs Cumberbatch's performance, which skews a little too far towards obvious fear and unpreparedness.

Cumberbatch has a certain theatricality that he can't hide, he's too showy for the role of someone who is supposed to be trusted by everyone on every side at any given moment.

xp - I enjoyed honourable schoolboy, but I remember next to nothing about it, so in retrospect it was probably not that great

Actually, I vaguely recall reading it and thinking it was something Len Deighton would have written better, but I could be confusing it with another forgettable le Carre

The Hon. Schoolboy is great!!

id declare firth over richardson i think

unfortunately firth is walking around with a huge giant pointy arrow sellotaped to his head say "obviously the mole is me"

aye the fact that he's the best known actor of any of the suspects and is the only one that has much screen time surely signals that a bit too much (id seen the bbc miniseries before i saw the film so it's hard to tell).

aye the fact that he's the best known actor of any of the suspects and is the only one that has much screen time surely signals that a bit too much

yeah, that was one of the disappointing things about the movie

I wasn't familiar with the story before watching the film and I didn't twig that Firth was the mole, although to be fair the main flaw with the film is that it spectacularly bad at making you care who the mole is.

ah its only the point in a very vague way

also toby tchoocallim has lots of screen time and has much more of a sign pointed at him

esterhazy is a dick on a few occasions and bland uh looks sinister in a few slo-mos so tbh it keeps it clean enough that way

films i had recently seen toby jones in (reverse order):
captain america: the first avenger (arnim zola)
st trinian's 2: the legend of fritton's gold (bursar)
frost/nixon (swifty lazar)
w. (karl rove) (!)

so i knew it couldn't be him

(also i'd read the book abt 349852309457 times)

My god Firth and Richardson tied? I adore Ian Richardson as Haydon. Also I do really like Hepton as Esterhase. Actually one of the performances that brings the most joy when watching! I love how he adopts an English accent in TTSS but loses it for something vaguely foreign in SP.

And his insane shirts

Esterhase also really shines in the Bern scenes in SP. We see how good he is at what he does.

yeah hes a much better performance and role in sp

firth dies better than richardson

i like richardson's weird broke-neck wriggle, even though it's totally unconvincing -- it sort of suits the stupid squalor of the situation (including the fact that the air and the charm go out of the character like a leaky balloon when he stops being an actor on a stage)

Ok I really don’t really remember the broke neck wriggle. Have to rewatch.

binged little drummer girl over three nights and thought it was good

the absence of actual british government agents until the last act made the one representative character take on an air of imperial cynicism that you miss out in some of the other le carre adaptations because everything's coated in that cynicism from the get-go

Ricki Tarr, one of fiction’s great dirtbags

Why did Alfredson's The Snowman get such terrible reviews? I thought it was okay--standard serial-killer stuff that at least looked good and maintained a kind of desolate mood.

(Val Kilmer's pretty bad, I should add--and almost unrecognizable at first.)

According to le Carré, The Ink Factory now plans to do new television adaptations of all the novels featuring Cold War spy George Smiley — this time in chronological order. “That means that if you actually go back to the first big conspiracies in ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Cold’ you’ve got to consider how Smiley ages and how young he was at that time,” le Carré says. That would mean finding an actor who can play younger than the Smiley incarnated by Gary Oldman in the film version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Le Carré says that his sons are interested in casting the British actor Jared Harris, whose performance they all admired in the recent TV mini-series “Chernobyl.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/books/john-le-carre-agent-running-in-the-field.html

Shit, Harris would be a really good pick