After taking in ALL the nauseating verbiage, and visuals, from last night of Day 3 of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, I needed to be brought back to the reality, and truth, of the good old days.
The Cold War.
So, I watched one of my favorite movies of the ’60s, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965).
The main character of the film, Alec Leamus, is a burnt-out British intelligence officer played by the late Richard Burton.
I think it is by far Burton’s best performance on film, ever…
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold might be one of the coolest, but tautest, movies ever made, in all senses of the words. Literally, because the characters always seem to be pulling their jackets against their necks while ducking into offices or bars for refuge from the wind. Figuratively, because director Martin Ritt (of Hud & Norma Rae fame as well) orchestrates the film’s ebb and flow of emotions with a finesse that’s chilling. The characters could be discussing tea, or liquor, or a brilliant plot to indirectly assassinate a German Intelligence Officer or his ambitious underling interrogator, or something else altogether, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from a cursory evaluation of the conversation’s tone. You would have to look deeper at inflection and context, and you’d have to probably be familiar with decades of global politics and theoretically suppressed British intelligence gathering, in order to fully understand what anyone is actually saying.
The despairing element, taken straight from the John le Carré bestseller of 1963, that inspired the film, is that NO one really does totally know what anyone else is saying. Spy fiction often allows a reader to indulge an empowering fantasy of possessing otherwise unattainable knowledge, but Le Carré’s books expose that notion for the wishful thinking it probably always is. To be a spy in Le Carré’s fiction, and the author famously lived a bit of what he writes, is to have knowledge that alienates you from the rest of the world. The knowledge you possess, as a Le Carré spy, only underlines how much you still don’t know, and this realization transforms life into a series of stifling paradoxes: The world is huge, yet claustrophobically contained in an endless procession of anonymous bars and backrooms, and every problem reveals a hundred more upon its solution. In other words, the Le Carré spy ultimately knows that he knows nothing.
Mental darkness, in a sense.
Solitude becomes, and is, an undefined enemy in itself.
Oskar Werner, the great Oskar Werner, who plays an East German spy officer, almost steals the movie…
Do yourself a favor, watch greatness…
Lobster on the Prairie 