Counter-Currents
1,491 words
I enjoy stories about intelligent people solving problems, hence my love for detective and espionage dramas, elements of which also spill over into the best superhero and science fiction. For instance, my favorite fictional character is Sherlock Holmes, who is not only a detective but does favors for British intelligence in the person of his brother Mycroft, plays superhero to Professor Moriarty’s supervillain, and of course employs science, both real and fictional.
I have always loved James Bond movies, but more for the action and spectacle than for the displays of intelligence work. No, aside from the real-life Anthony Ludovici, who worked for 20 years in MI6 before being purged in the runup to the Second World War, my favorite British secret agent is John le Carré’s George Smiley, the anti-Bond: short, fat, balding, and Donnish, constantly humiliated by his cheating wife Ann, constantly needled and bullied by the overgrown schoolboys he works with — and yet ever victorious over Britain’s enemies through patient, grinding, and unfailingly intelligent work.
If somebody were to pitch George Smiley as a super-spy in the space of an elevator ride, I would dismiss him instantly as a very unlikely hero. The fact that he is a hero to millions is proof of le Carré’s genius. Great fiction makes the unlikely seem inevitable. It is easy to create Bonds and Bond knockoffs. But there’s only one George Smiley.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is my first and favorite Smiley story. Le Carré’s novel is magnificent in its plotting, characterization, and world-building. If your impression of Her Majesty’s Secret Service was formed by Bond novels or movies, you will find it completely dismantled. In le Carré’s world, intelligence is a bureaucracy, not an adventure. Although there are some young, swashbuckling field operatives in exotic locales, most of the real work is done under leaden English skies by paunchy, dog-faced, chain-smoking, whiskey-sodden civil servants who are middle-aged to decrepit. The offices are not grand sets full of stainless steel and flashing screens. They are drab, dingy, and cluttered. But by purging intelligence work of glamor, le Carré manages to highlight the importance of intellect, including minute observation of character and brilliant leaps of abductive reasoning.[1]
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The basic story of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a mole hunt. The year is 1973. British foreign intelligence, simply known as “the Circus,” is headed by Control, a shrewd but decrepit bureaucrat in his 70s. His five lieutenants are all in their 50s, recruited into intelligence before, during, or shortly after the Second World War: George Smiley, Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Tony Esterhase. Control believes one of them is a mole and launches a secret mission to Eastern Europe to learn the mole’s identity. The mission is a fiasco, and Control and Smiley are forced to resign. Alleline takes over. Control dies soon after.
Some months pass, and Smiley is contacted by higher ups. New evidence of a mole has come to light, and since Smiley was safely retired, he is no longer a suspect. Given his knowledge of the men involved, he is pressed into leading an unofficial mole hunt to determine who is the culprit: Alleline, Haydon, Bland, or Esterhase. Smiley is aided by a couple of swashbucklers, Peter Guillam and Ricky Tarr, as well as a retired Scotland Yard inspector, Mendel.
Smiley’s team is what we have come to call a “deep state” operation: the state is failing to serve the common good, thus a network of patriots must go outside the law and mechanisms of state in order to restore order. The same role is played by vigilantes, lynch mobs, and superheroes. All of them are playing the sovereign role as defined by Carl Schmitt: They decide that there is a state of emergency in which the existing laws and its executives cannot secure the common good; they determine what must be done to restore order; and they act.[2]
As Smiley’s investigation unfolds, we encounter a number of colorful characters, piece together laboriously-gathered facts, negotiate some interesting plot twists, and set an ingenious trap for the mole, who is brought to justice. But Smiley’s ultimate quarry is not the mole but the mole’s master, known only as Karla, the head of a shadowy KGB directorate that runs moles around the world. The fight against Karla is carried on in the next two Smiley novels, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was first brought to the screen in 1979 in a seven-episode BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness as Smiley and directed by John Irvin. The script by Richard Hopcraft is remarkably faithful to the book, largely because the book is already “filmic,” and the running time of slightly more than six hours does not require much compression.
The storyline is basically unchanged, but elements of the narrative are introduced in a different order. The biggest changes are that the book’s Hong Kong sequences were relocated to Lisbon, probably to cut the cost of location shooting, and a death that remains mysterious in the book is shown in the series.
The BBC series is superbly acted, particularly Alec Guinness as Smiley. Smiley is difficult character to play, because he’s supposed to be a cipher: taciturn, patient, non-demonstrative, a man who gets lost in every crowd. Guinness is remarkable at communicating Smiley’s intelligence and emotional complexity with the tiniest gestures and expressions. Siân Phillips is brilliantly cast as Smiley’s unfaithful wife Ann. Most of the main characters are remarkably ugly, which is faithful to the novel.
The only downside of the BBC series is that it was made for TV, meaning that it is cheap-looking, padded, and manipulative. The BBC bean-counters must have loved le Carré’s run-down and seedy settings, which allowed them to film in cheap locations while remaining faithful to the novel. The six-hour running time includes sequences that can only be described as padding: for instance, interminably watching people and vehicles enter or leave the screen. And of course you need cliffhanger endings to ensure that the viewing audience tunes in next week. Television is such an empty, unrewarding medium.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was adapted as a big-budget movie in 2011 by Swedish director Tomas Alfredson. Gary Oldman plays George Smiley. The uniformly excellent cast also includes Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The script by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan compresses the story to a running time of just over two hours.
This movie looks gorgeous, with superb cinematography, sets, and scenic locations. The mission in a rainy Czech forest is moved to Budapest. The novel’s Hong Kong sequence, which the BBC transposed to Portugal, is set in Istanbul. The film also takes some tasteless liberties with the story: Guillam is made homosexual, and there isn’t exactly a dearth of homosexuality in the novel to begin with. Beyond that, there are four tastelessly bloody murders.
But the big disappointment is Gary Oldman as Smiley. He’s a very fine actor, but he plays Smiley too flat. He remains a two-dimensional cipher. My main objection to the script is that too much characterization is left out, while less important things are kept in or added. If you are familiar with the book, the film will be meaningful to you. But it doesn’t stand on its own. If you don’t already know the characters, you will find the film baffling and uninvolving. Thus, for all its cheapness and sprawl, the BBC miniseries remains the best adaptation of le Carré’s novel.
The success of the BBC Tinker Tailor led to a sequel: 1982’s Smiley’s People. The BBC skipped over the actual sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy, which is set in Southeast Asia, because they deemed the location shooting too expensive.
Alec Guinness returns as Smiley and is again superb. The cast also includes Michael Lonsdale, Alan Rickman, Patrick Stewart, Curd Jürgens, Vladek Sheybal, and Siân Phillips. The screenplay is by John le Carré and John Hopkins, with Simon Langton directing. Smiley’s People looks much better than the BBC’s Tinker Tailor and is more tightly directed.
The story is classic le Carré. Once again, Smiley is called out of retirement to do some unofficial investigating which puts him back on the trail of Karla. The ending is highly satisfying. Smiley triumphs over Karla, even as he recoils in disgust for having done so with Karla’s own methods. I can’t really relate to such moral confusion, but that’s Smiley.
There are seven other Smiley books by John le Carré. Four of them have been adapted for the screen, one of them without Smiley. In a better world, there would be a whole Smiley “franchise,” just like James Bond. But then again, in ten years they’d be threatening to give the role to Idris Ebla.
Notes
[1] See Greg Johnson, “Ben Novak’s Hitler and Abductive Logic,” Counter-Currents, December 31, 2019.
[2] See Greg Johnson, “Superheroes, Sovereignty, and the Deep State,” Counter-Currents, July 26, 2016.
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30 comments
I enjoyed the Gary Oldman version. Thanks for all the background. Nice review.
I think you’d love the Guinness one, then.
I will check it out. He was great as Fagin.
I recommend the Guinness one, too.
Great review and I agree wholeheartedly. I really hope they make The Honourable Schoolboy into a film or series. Or should I say I wish they had already: they’d probably set it in Lagos or Calcutta these days.
Moved comment down as I did not mean it as a reply to Phil_Regular
A worthy Smiley adaptation is Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (1966), based on le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). James Mason plays Smiley (named Charles Dobbs in the movie, as Paramount had acquired film rights to the Smiley character name at the time). I rate it a 4/5. Mason also stars in the very good, anti-Stalinist, Carol Reed spy film The Man Between (1953), which features terrific principal photography in the actual, bombed out, post-war Berlin, and which deploys great noir-lighting effects. I’d also rate this one a 4/5.
Thanks, have not seen either of these.
Good review. The BBC Tinker miniseries is one of my favorite series and book adaptations. Guinness’s fine acting is arguably on the same level as his performance in Bridge over the River Kwai. The series is gloriously White and British, with a dash of pre-war continental European (Esterhase).
I did not know that Ludovici worked for MI6 before the war. Was he purged for ideological reasons or ethnic (Italian) reasons? Or both?
Ludovici was actually a German name, Latinized during the post-Renaissance Latinizing craze. He was purged for being an extreme Rightist, anti-Semite, attendee at the Nuremberg Rallies, etc.
Sarcastic Kök Böri will add here, that Kim Philby was not purged from the SIS in the same times, and even much later Comrade Kim was warned by his colleague Elliott to let hit run away from Beirut.
Thank you for bringing this character to my attention. I will surely buy the book. (When I’ll get around to reading it is not so sure…)
Thanks for a great review. Smiley’s People was one of the first “serious” television I saw at the age of about 14. I rewatched it a few years ago and it was as good as I remembered.
To add to the recommendations, there’s a good film version of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold starring Richard Burton. Smiley makes a small appearance, as does Bernard Lee who went on to play M in the Bond films, this time as a grocer.
Can I also say generally how much I welcome reviews of classic TV and film. I find most of the anti-white diversity propaganda of the last 20 years unwatchable, and recommendations from people like Trevor/Greg who know more than I do are a hugely valuable resource.
Thanks. I will try to do more. There’s almost nothing worth watching in the theaters today.
Almost nothing worth watching? Understatement of the year Greg!
I have not seen a movie in a theatre in ten years. I miss going to the movies. But there is nothing worth seeing anymore.
I miss drive-ins, too.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has perhaps the definitive Control, played by Cyril Cusack.
I like Alexander Knox as Control in the BBC Tinker, Tailor but he’s really ancient there, and I wonder whether that Control mightn’t have been put out to pasture long before. Curious thing about Knox is that he’s North American (Canadian), has played Americans (Woodrow Wilson), Australians (Dr McDonnell to Rosalind Russell’s Sister Kenny, which he also helped script; he and Roz age about 40 years onscreen); and often enough Englishmen, but never put on a shred of any kind of accent or dialect. In Tinker, Tailor you get the idea that Control/Knox comes from an era before people started speaking in funny accents.
Thanks for this, there really hasn’t been anything worth watching for a while now.
Cold War espionage is fascinating. You might enjoy Ben Macintyre’s novel “A Spy Among Friends”.
Kim Philby was a true believer.
“A Spy Among Friends”
That’s not a novel, but a non-fiction book. Very good one.
About Le Carre’, I remember that his first novels, like
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963),
The Looking Glass War (1965),
A Small Town in Germany (1968),
were extremely Germanophobic.
Germanophobic and, as usually goes with it, philo-Semitic. I recall enjoying the Richard Burton film of “Spy Who…” and probably the book at some point, but on a recent re-reading I found it rather distasteful. Apart from continual harping on the poor, poor friendless Jews who dindu nuffin, the whole point of the plot is that Realpolitik requires Burton’s character to be fooled into thinking he’s going to expose an ex-Nazi in the E. Germany govt but actually the plan is to have the whole thing blow up and instead incriminate the innocent and soulful Jewish prosecutor Burton has taken a shine to. As Greg says above, I don’t identify with that “moral dilemma.” I can go along with his “both sides are corrupt” viewpoint (as did Yockey!) but rather than being neutral he always finds a way to promote the Jews.
“I believe the Number 11 bus goes to Hammersmith and that Father Christmas isn’t driving it.” That’s from the novel, I think (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), but it may also be in the movie in a garbled version. What Alec Leamas says when Nan asks him what he believes in, just as she reveals she’s a Commie. When I grew up and went to London I looked for the Hammersmith bus along Kings Road and found that the Number 11 to Hammersmith had long since been replaced by the Number 22.
Then I saw Peter O’Toole on TV giving the “Number 11 bus” line and figured, so maybe it goes back a lot further than leCarré and it’s not meant as a literal direction to Hammersmith?
A Spy Among Friends, the book, is excellent, but I panned the “freely adapted” television series here on C-C. New Year’s Day, I think.
For me, the 1979 Tinker Tailor with Alec Guinness was the masterpiece. The Burlington Files gives a fascinating insight into just how little agents in the field know about what they are doing whether in London or Port au Prince maybe as a prelude to a Haitien equivalent to the Bay of Pigs. Also, remember it’s written by an agent not a professional writer like JleC so don’t expect JleC delicate diction et al.
If you dig into the backgrounds of Pemberton’s People in MI6 you will understand so much more and be rewarded when reading Beyond Enkription. I suggest you read the brief News Articles in TheBurlingtonFiles website dated 31 October 2022, 26 September 2021 and 7 January 2020. One critic described Beyond Enkription as ”up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. He wasn’t that far wrong, indeed arguably spot on.
JleC worked as an SIS case officer, but not long. Before this he was in the Intelligence Corps (Army G-2) and then in Security Service (MI5)
Supposedly because Philby’s defection in January 1963 killed a lot of the SIS networks, leCarré included.
Sorry, but here I am a dissenter. I do not believe that Philby as a Soviet spy did any harm to BRITISH interests. He did it to Americans and to Anti-Communist emigrees from the Eastern block (Ukrainians, Albanians, Latvians, etc.). Maybe his chiefs knew that he was working for the Russians and allowed him to do it. That’s why the British let him go away in Beirut. If he had really did something bad to Britain, he would get 42 years in prison like George Blake (his escape is another story).
In the Soviet intelligence center there was a clever woman Elena Modrzinskaya (ethnic Pole), and she till her death in 1982 was absolutely sure that Philby and the others of the “Cambridge Five” were double agents who remained ultimately loyal to Britain. By the way, the same hypothesis was expressed by the American-Jewish writer Robert Littell in his spy novel “Young Philby.”
Yes – an interesting career and apparently he almost collaborated on The Burlington Files project as noted in the article referred to above.
I highly recommend Trevor Lynch’s books, including this one:
https://counter-currents.com/product/trevor-lynchs-classics-of-right-wing-cinema/
I also would recommend Michael Waller’s book BIG INTEL
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Intel-Heroes-State-Villains/dp/1684513537/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IIM66UWA2CAR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LPhcOWkU35aOpmspf1kDrvtapo7BdRh7NMgoVfizwmhAGKMzxxwQbFXwN49oYqiiGLCDSopexeYOdcT9qxxovg.fVbhQjsQJMc-lSsEGRD1qQWnGawuVfEpbecF_qc894g&dib_tag=se&keywords=big+intel+michael+waller&qid=1714797398&sprefix=big+intel+%2Caps%2C236&sr=8-1
I got the book only yesterday and after immediately started reading I enjoy it very much. Here you find everything – Bolshevik influence, Political correctness, Frankfurter Schule, Leftist subversion of America, and also intelligence and counterintelligence.
I found some factical errors in the book, but after reading of first 10 chapters I can surely say that the Waller’s book is good.
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