The don of disillusionment: John le Carré on film
I met John le Carré once, in 2016; appropriately enough, it was in Berlin where the TV adaptation of The Night Manager was getting a showcase premiere at the film festival — and the city where, as an MI6 agent in 1961 he had witnessed the construction of the Wall, which inspired his breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He was instantly charming, eloquent and inexhaustibly curious and knowledgeable about the movies showing in Berlin that year, especially Alex Gibney’s Zero Days, a documentary about cyberwarfare. While always very relaxed, he had that alpha-donnish skill in asking you questions – including detailed questions about my own recent reviews. To my shame, I committed the No 1 error of protocol with him. As he had called me “Peter”, I replied by calling him “John”. (Please. It’s “David”, and only if you’re at that pay grade, which I wasn’t.) Le Carré’s fiction had a twine of celluloid in its DNA: particularly the movie-making of Graham Greene and Carol Reed in The Third Man. The dark shadows of that movie loomed over his imagination, from a city (Vienna) divided up by the second world war’s victorious and now mutually resentful allies. The paranoia, the sense of postwar peace perennially threatened and undermined by some new terrible incursion, the theme of personal betrayal, and the vivid nightmare of “going over to the other side” in a theological or geopolitical sense: it all informed his writing. Orson Welles’s breezy Harry Lime talking about the happy Swiss inventing nothing more interesting than the cuckoo clock was the tone of complaisant, emollient cynicism that Le Carré was to encounter in the real-life British establishment, and which he satirised and anatomised in his own work. (And at one further remove, Le Carré’s darkness and sense of sin maybe had something of the German expressionists, Peter Lorre’s child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, on the run from his accusers.)
The 1965 film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by Martin Ritt, in austere monochrome and with a mordant leading performance from Richard Burton, has that shadowy Carol Reed sense of misery and fear. But Burton’s agent, Alec Leamas, does at least take up a proactive position: he wants out and in the classic style of Hollywood heroes, is prepared to take on “one last job” in return for a promised exit from the whole grubby business of espionage.
So, however imprisoned, he is a hero of sorts, though more of an inaction man than an action man. Le Carré said that he owed a great deal to Ian Fleming for creating an audience for him. In this movie, Rupert Davies (elsewhere, Maigret on TV) had a small role as the later-to-be-iconic George Smiley.The cold war was still in full swing when Le Carré adapted his The Looking Glass War in 1970 for director Frank Pierson, in which Anthony Hopkins’s spy sends a Polish defector
back into East Germany to check on missile sites. Though a bit convoluted, it does arguably have a pair of classic Le Carré establishment figures in Paul Rogers and Ralph Richardson.
After the BBC’s classic miniseries version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley set a new benchmark for Le Carré adaptations and for event TV generally, the movies looked for the bigger picture in this author; often for international locations and for a grownup, flawed sense of personal romance as the corollary of ideological betrayal. Director George Roy Hill took on The Little Drummer Girl in 1984, starring Diane Keaton as the troubled American actor with a tricky personal relationship with the truth, dragooned by Mossad into entrapping a Palestinian. It was a so-so movie that didn’t find that personal register of personal passion which unlocks the political dimension – Korean auteur Park Chan-wook directed a TV miniseries version two years ago with better results.And then, at the end of the 80s, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union unravelled, glasnost began, and the movies had to find a new way of representing Le Carré’s work just as the author himself had to adapt. Tom Stoppard was the ideal choice to adapt The Russia House in 1990, with Sean Connery as the boozy, stroppy London publisher who goes to Moscow to meet Klaus Maria Brandauer, the author of a sensationally revealing (or misleading) manuscript about Russian nuclear capabilities – and he falls for the intermediary, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. It’s a very cerebral, non-action movie, but was the whole idea out of touch? The next two Le Carré movies found a surer and more satisfying register. Andrew Davies adapted The Tailor of Panama, directed by John Boorman in 2001, which returns us to the Greeneian black comedy of a shabby tailor in Panama (Geoffrey Rush) who is pressured into working for British intelligence and begins making things up. Harold Pinter has a potent cameo as this man’s late uncle, giving him advice from beyond the grave. In 2005, director Fernando Meirelles put a new rocket-thrust of energy into the whole idea of the Le Carré adaptation, with his version of The Constant Gardener, a conspiracy-thriller-cum-lovestory with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, showing that the movies do not have to approximate a torpid melancholy and resignation. Susanna White directed a tough, watchable version of Our Kind of Traitor in 2016.
But there is no doubt about it. The late-period Le Carré movies that work best are the ones flavoured by disillusion. Philip Larkin said that deprivation was for him what daffodils were to Wordsworth … and he might have added, and what disillusion is to Le Carré on screen. Anton Corbijn directed a terrific version of A Most Wanted Man, with Philip Seymour Hoffman giving his final performance.And in 2011, we returned to the magnum opus — somehow, this is the Le Carré masterpiece that floats above them. Screenwriters Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor created a superlative new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson, which, though set in the same period, resonated with the new mood, accommodating the world after 9/11 and after the disastrous retaliatory Iraq war. The film is now a period piece, superbly and meticulously recreated: shabby, pompous Britain mismanaging its own decline.The best Le Carré movies amplified the best in Le Carré himself: the satire, the black tragicomedy, the national pantomime of secret misery, and the final paradoxical possibility of redemptive human decency.