4 Star

Cat and Mouse Behind the Iron Curtain.

From the pen of spy thriller master John le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV Mini-Series), Smiley’s People (TV Mini-Series), The Constant Gardener) comes a classic spooks film, directed by Martin Ritt (Hud, The Brotherhood, Norma Rae). He takes us into the underbelly of what we never see, but read about in the broadsheets. As Richard Buton‘s (Hamlet, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Taming of the Shrew, Where Eagles Dare) embittered character goes on one last mission to get the man that has plagued his career, and to set himself up for retirement.

From the time when the war was cold and the iron curtain colder, and a new wall separates West Germany from the communist East Germany. Secrets are kept and suspicions run rife as the free West tries to counter the threat of communism spreading to the West.

The main crossing from East to West in Berlin is checkpoint Charlie and on a cold night British operative Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) waits patiently for his final undercover operative, Karl Riemeck. A man with a bicycle approaches the checkpoint on the Eastern side, a tense few moments pass before the barrier is raised and the man passes beneath it and heads for the West but in the no-man’s ground a siren whirs up alerting the guards who open fire killing Riemeck and ending any reason for Leamas to remain in Berlin, and he is recalled to London.

Back in London Leamas heads to meet Control (Cyril Cusack, Fahrenheit 451, The Day of the Jackal) to be debriefed about the deaths of his operatives as he was head of operations in Berlin.

One needs to come in from the cold.

The main person behind the killing of operatives is a man by the name of Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck, The Longest Day, The Bridge at Remagen), and he is known to the British, for his involvement in the murder of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan a few years earlier, and now he has risen to prominence, and becomes the head of the East German Abteilung. He must be brought down,

I want you to stay in the cold a little longer.

The way to get Mundt is to convince him that there is a defector within the ranks of British intelligence, and we see Leamas demoted to a desk job which he hates. He starts to show signs of dissent and acquires a drinking problem which eventually gets him sacked for some money swindling off the government. So Leamas’ next port of call is the unemployment exchange looking for a new job, with his experience of fluent German, there are not a lot of opportunities, but there is an opportunity at a local library, recategorizing the books, this is where he meets Nancy ‘Nan’ Perry (Claire Bloom, Clash of the Titans, The Book of Eve). They start to get along well until Leamas’ drinking gets the better of him, and he assaults his local grocer Mr. Patmore (Bernard Lee, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die) and ends up doing a short stretch in Wormwood Scrubs, but when he gets out Nan is there waiting for him and a strange man watches from across the road.

Has the bait been taken?

It’s the innocents that get slaughtered.

The journey Leamas is about to embark on, is his greatest work, and along the way he will meet with Mundt’s second in command Fiedler (Oskar Werner, The Last Ten Days, Voyage of the Damned). Now he is the man who can make a difference.