Supra-Spy

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. More than 5,000,000 readers have been hooked and held by pseudonymous Author John le Carre's downbeat spy thriller, which scores espionage as a grubby, ulcer-making career at best. The movie version is a masterwork in a minor key. Avoiding formula excitement, Producer-Director Martin Ritt (Hud) achieves something far superior--a climate of still, absolute insecurity that conveys menace mainly through undertones. And Richard Burton, playing the chief pawn in an involuted cold-war plot, will be measured from now on against his full, corrosive performance here. To have read le Carre can only heighten one's relish of Burton's collision with the prickly dialogue supplied by Scenarists Guy Trosper and Paul Dehn.

As the British intelligence hack Leamas, Burton looks puffy, paunchy, burnt out. His shoulders sag, he interrupts himself with breathy exhalations, and his eyes are dead because he is bored with killing but beyond caring. "It's like metal fatigue," says Control (Cyril Cusack), recalling Leamas from West Berlin to London for an extraordinary mission: to frame Mundt, the Communist intelligence chief whose assassins have been eradicating Britain's East German informants. Leamas must act as a decoy, shamming to convince the East Germans that he is embittered and ripe to defect. While the gears of intrigue mesh, Burton's face projects more nakedly than the novel did that Leamas, believing in nothing, half believes in his own worthlessness.

Director Ritt, without belaboring the tragedy of Leamas, coolly commits to film the grey nether world that the spy inhabits. There are no miraculous escapes or Union Jack heroics. Just ordinary men, trained to be distrustful, sizing one another up at a glance, measuring the assessment against every subsequent pause and gesture. Through ever-changing shades of perfidy on both sides of the Wall, the drama inches toward its bitter climax, made more agonizing by Ritt's detachment. He simply records an event and lets the shock wave follow.

To give Burton sturdy opposition, Oskar Werner, as Mundt's itchy second-in-command, makes that "clever little Jew" a prismatic study of ambition thwarted. Claire Bloom, though too prettily cast as the leftist English librarian who befriends Leamas, nonetheless plays innocence abroad with life-or-death urgency. In Spy's superblend of suspense and philosophical despair, the girl is the last to know that her lover was already a cold-war casualty when she met him. The anonymous men who live by violence, Leamas tells her savagely, "are a bunch of seedy squalid bastards, henpecked husbands, sadists, queers, drunkards," themselves among the saddest victims of the causes they defend.

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