From The New York Times:
Few authors have had a better shake at the movies than John le Carré, whose sophisticated novels of Cold War atmosphere, moral ambiguities and wryly observed backroom machinations have long attracted talented filmmakers and leading actors.
While Alec Guinness’s definitive performance as George Smiley in the BBC mini-series versions of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982) are currently not available to stream in the U.S., there’s still a range of quality le Carré adaptations to sample over a half-century stretch. Some go inside the not-so-fashionable lives of British agents while others follow outsiders — a bureaucrat, a hotel manager, an actress — as they’re brought into new worlds of intrigue and danger. These seven films and two mini-series give the flavor of le Carré’s uniquely jaundiced take on the spy thriller genre.
‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’ (1965)
The first le Carré adaptation in any medium set the tone for the others that followed, establishing the spy game not as a life of glamour and adventure, but as a world blanketed by paranoia and suspicion, populated by world-weary men with inscrutable motives. Photographed in a perpetually gloomy black-and-white, the film casts Richard Burton as a British agent who works an elaborate ruse in the wake of an operative’s shooting death by East German troops. Showing outward appearances of displeasure with his station, including a fake demotion to desk duty in London, he makes himself the target of East German agents, who believe, falsely, they have a defector to turn.
Stream it on Amazon Prime. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.
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‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ (2011)
In the role of George Smiley, the le Carré protagonist immortalized onscreen by Alec Guinness, Gary Oldman gives a performance so thoroughly internalized that he nearly disappears into the film’s beige, smoky backdrops. As the film opens in the early 1970s, Smiley has spent a lifetime in British intelligence, but the death of a mentor (John Hurt) in the early 1970s leads him into semiretirement. He soon re-emerges as part of an effort to uncover a Soviet mole within MI6, which offers him a shot at redemption and a chance to summon his expertise at stamping out subtle threats in his midst. This version of “Tinker, Tailor” has some trouble condensing its labyrinthine plot, but as a mood piece, it captures le Carré’s essence perfectly.
Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
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