EW DVD Review: "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold"
By: Chris Nashawaty - Entertainment Weekly
To view our videos, you need to:
1. Enable JavaScript. Learn how.
2. Install Adobe Flash. Install now.
Then come back here and refresh the page.
For a guy who's written as many great spy novels as John LeCarre, it's amazing how many cruddy movies have been made out of them.
There are two exceptions, though - BBC's 1979 miniseries masterpiece “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and Richard Burton’s 1965 thriller “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” which is just now being released on a beautiful new two-disc Criterion set.
“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” was LeCarre's first bestseller when it was published back in the early 1960s, and the movie shows exactly why it was able to strike such a nerve. LeCarre's Cold War human chess pawns were the seedier, more realistic flipside to Ian Fleming's James Bond - the anti-007.
There's no special effects, no sexy femme fatales with saucy double-entendre names, no high-tech weapons like wristwatches with built-in tracking devices, and no villains with shiny metal teeth. This was the gritty, black-and-white tale of a small fish doing the real shovel and spade work of espionage.
Burton plays Alec Leamas, a burned-out, hard-drinking station head of British intelligence in Berlin, the navel of the Cold War. After one of his undercover agents is shot at Checkpoint Charlie just as he's about to get away from the Communists, Leamas is called back to London and given a new mission.
Leamus must go pose as a burned-out, drunk ex-spy (some stretch for Burton) and allow himself to be recruited by the East Germans, where he will try to feed them false intelligence and take down a high-level East German spymaster named Mundt, played by Oskar Werner.
But while playing his role, Burton falls in love with a librarian, played by Claire Bloom, and it's only a matter of time before she gets caught in the net too.
There are too many tasty double- and triple-crosses to spoil by saying much more, but when you've had enough of Daniel Craig's gruff hunk of a 007, rent this one instead.
Now for a look at what else is new on DVD: in “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson sleuth the paranormal; in “Wanted,” Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy are assassins with special powers; and in “Step Brothers,” John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell play bickering new bros.