"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," Paramount Pictures, 1965

Here's one earthly place that is forever lodged in my brain pleats, from years of black and white moviewatching on middle-century suburban TV: the Euro cities of the Cold War, sunless and cold and gray and wet, comprised of decaying historical buildings and ancient alleys but fraught with up-to-the-minute mortal dread, inhabited by stone-faced men in trenchcoats without hearts. Espionage was such a gift to cinema: once ordinary urban locations became electrified with international import, and the criminal schmucks of noir became romanticized existentialist figures, lost in the patterns of political force like mice in a maze. No movie better pegs this vibe than "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965), adapted from John le Carré's genre-defining bestseller, and hewing so closely to the dishonest and soulless quotidian of spy work that the effect is thoroughly grown-up, a bracing whisky shot after drinking gallons of James Bond-brand pink lemonade. Richard Burton is a misanthropic and drunken field agent going undercover as, essentially, himself, and getting played from every side across Europe, and the actor's sour, plummy glamour has never been as effective. His character's natural, bottomless insolence is not only his best cover story, but is what makes him genuinely hate what he does. Martin Ritt directed with his customary lack of personality, but also with a degree of modesty and clarity; the discovery of layers of machinations and double-crossing are complex enough to demand a certain understanding of Cold War politics, and of the day-to-day nature of espionage. (Le Carré's genuine spymaster past is unmistakable, just as Ian Fleming's is puzzlingly absent from his fiction.)

Here is revealed the genre's greatest claim to fame: that the life-or-death stakes of espionage are almost by definition not matters of action movie heroism or physical skill, but of operations that must play out within, or secretly beneath, conventional social situations. Behavior is scrupulously examined, and alliances always under question. Even if you win at a spy game, you lose your soul. By the end of the film, where the Berlin Wall is used perhaps for the first time as a movie icon of 20th-century schizophrenia, the hope that the ends justify whatever means democracies use is dashed in the darkness. The Criterion dossier comes with a second disc of interviews, commentaries, le Carré docs, set designs, etc.

[Additional photo: "Encounters at the End of the World," THINKFilm, 2008]

"Encounters at the End of the World" (Image Entertainment) and "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (Criterion Collection) are now available on DVD.

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