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Relationships and espionage, "I'm a battlefield for toy soldiers." Death of the communist agent, his widow (Simone Signoret) is a concentration camp survivor. The Security Service operative (James Mason) is on the case, officially at first and then on his own, the suicide gradually starts to look like a murder. The retired inspector (Harry Andrews) is a strapping asset despite a penchant for dozing off, the wartime colleague (Maximilian Schell) is more connected than he appears. Aggression at work and gentleness at home is the protagonist's avowed approach, he gazes at his compulsively adulterous wife (Harriet Andersson) and sighs: "The unaddicted shouldn't blame the addicted." Russell the same year blows up the Bond mystique in Billion Dollar Brain, Sidney Lumet in London opts for autumnal melancholia and kitchen-sink drabness. A dull government job, answering to a mocking superior and wondering about the restless bird in the bedroom, a tangle of betrayal is merely part of the mundane in the John le Carré world. "That seems to be the fashion nowadays." The romantic promise of a Quincy Jones bossa nova is a veil for conjugal sordidness, derring-do is limited to the beating of a stoolie and a slippery scuffle on a muddy harbor. Then the investigation ventures inside a shabby Macbeth production, and the overcast screen welcomes the theatrical green shades and a bit of goony humor from Lynn Redgrave. (Marlowe's Edward II also has a part to play, a furtive execution in the audience of a Royal Shakespeare Company performance.) "Go look for more spies on your drawing board, because you have no place among real people." The closing scene brushes up against La Guerre est finie. With Kenneth Haigh, Roy Kinnear, Max Adrian, Robert Flemyng, and Corin Redgrave.
--- Fernando F. Croce |