My life in espionage
If I cast my mind back to my childhood, the memories of news stories that remain are not that many, but vivid (even if incompletely understood at the time). I remember the excitement of the space race as the most positive ongoing story. I remember the relentless misery of the war in Vietnam as the most negative. Other overseas conflicts, equally confusing and opaque to wee nippers like me, included the war in Biafra and British military "involvement" in Kenya (pronounced "Keenya" when a Crown Colony), Yemen and Cyprus, as the former Empire continued to contract. Agita in and from Northern Ireland was a constant of fluctuating intensity. The assassination of President Kennedy I recall as being a huge shock to the adult world around me and, though I understood that the murder of an important individual had significance, the extent of the reaction perplexed me. The most significant crime here in the UK was the so-called Great Train Robbery where £2.5m (equivalent £30m, today) was stolen from a Royal Mail train, while the most reported criminals were probably the brutal (but by modern standards small-time) gangsters, the Kray twins (popular company, as such people often are, with the fashionable and the powerful). The biggest political scandal was the Profumo Affair, where the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, through various other seedy interactions, ended up sharing the same mistress with a Soviet naval attaché (or perhaps navel attaché might be a more appropriate term?). I need hardly state that, at no more than five-years-old, apart from the constant media presence of the story, I knew and understood little of the details and significance of that narrative. Oddly, I don't remember much about—or being much affected by—the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps there was a degree of parental intervention shielding me from that one, I couldn't say.
Threading through all of this, of course, was the Cold War, which brings us to the subject proper.
Possibly the most infamous instance of Russian/Soviet espionage in the British Establishment is that of the so-called Cambridge spy ring, whose activities compromised both British and American intelligence for a period of about twenty years. Its exposure began in the 1950s with the flight of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the USSR to avoid the consequences of their betrayal, but revelations continued for decades afterwards, with Kim Philby also fleeing in the early 1960s as the net closed, and Anthony Blunt confessing to his crimes at about the same time in return for immunity from prosecution (the fifth member of the ring, John Cairncross, remained unknown to the public for many years, though he too confessed in the 1960s).
The Cold War has been a rich source for literature and entertainment globally, but notably in the UK, particularly through the written works of Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, Graham Greene and Len Deighton, the first three of whom had first-hand experience of involvement with British intelligence services (Greene actually reported to traitor Philby when employed by MI6) as well as being products of the "Establishment" (Le Carré's uncle was an MP, though his father was a fraudster who had some association with the aforementioned Krays). While the less socially elevated Deighton was conscripted for National Service in the RAF in 1946, his inspiration for writing stories of espionage apparently came from the experience of seeing a family acquaintance arrested as a Nazi spy during WWII. Obviously, many of their works have been successfully transferred to the screens of cinema and television, most recently a miniseries based on Deighton's first novel, The IPCRESS File.
Especially in Britain (unsurprisingly), the Cambridge spy ring has long excited interest and curiosity, both by the inherent mystery and intrigue of the deception, but also of the motivation for betrayal. Julian Mitchell's play, Another Country (kick starter for the careers of Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh, and later filmed by Marek Kanievska in 1984), portrays a fictionalised Burgess-like character alienated by the rigidly conservative and oppressive Establishment exemplified by the English public (ie private) school system. Probably Britain's favourite playwright, Alan Bennet, reviewed the personal aftermath of the betrayal in two plays, more sympathetically in An Englishman Abroad, which took as inspiration an actual Moscow meeting between Australian actress (and wife of Vincent Price) Coral Browne and the defector Burgess, and less sympathetically in A Question of Attribution, which portrayed a fictionalised juxtaposition of Blunt's post-discovery interrogation by security services and his integration within the Establishment as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Both were filmed at different times for television and both plays were later staged together under the umbrella title of Single Spies (co-incidentally the last theatre-going experience of my wife and I before we fled London for Hertfordshire). Being plays by Bennet, there's a fair bit of humour and wit about them, not withstanding their serious subject.
It's easy to see why the fascination remains: the themes of complex loyalties and betrayal, of inherent human weaknesses and the inevitability of their destructive effect are ripe for dramatic and literary portrayal, as they have been from the time of Shakespeare.
For me, best of the 1960s Cold War thrillers from America is the 1962 production of The Manchurian Candidate, a well-acted, beautifully crafted, and incredibly tense thriller with a strong performance by a gifted but now often unfairly forgotten actor, Laurence Harvey. It's a film that obviously centres on a very dramatic conspiracy. I haven't seen the later remake and find it difficult to imagine how the first could be bettered.
As might be expected, the conspiracies and intrigue are less high-flown in many a British spy film. The most low-key example that I can think of is a watchable but decidedly pedestrian work simply titled Ring of Spies (Shadow of Treason in the US), starring 2001: A Space Odyssey's William Sylvester. It's a dramatization of a real case: the Portland spy ring, where naval secrets were sold—this time for non-ideological reasons—to the Soviet Union. I kind of like the picture, myself, though it's only workmanlike rather than being in any way notable.
The unglamorous aspect of espionage has hardly been better served than by Le Carré, and in the various screen adaptions of his oeuvre. His deceptively mild-mannered character, George Smiley, has been played by numerous actors in such productions but never better than by Gary Oldman in the 2011 film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones are both very good in their parts, too, while the film as a whole recreates the early 1970s period convincingly and maintains great tension with hardly a punch thrown or a car chased. The other stand-out production of Le Carré is 1965's movie of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, featuring Richard Burton (and Rupert Davies as Smiley). There can be no bleaker espionage picture than this, but Burton's portrayal of its protagonist as a fundamentally decent but jaded, used-up and beaten-down character, duped by cannier players of the game, is excellent.
The deception and danger of espionage, as we all know, features in many of Hitchcock's movies, including (the oft-filmed novel by John Buchan) The 39 Steps, (two versions of) The Man Who Knew Too Much and Saboteur, the narratives of which either predate the Cold War or are indistinct as to who the antagonists are working for. North by North-West, though also imprecise about the ultimate identity of the power behind the espionage, fits more closely into a Cold War scenario though with a higher quotient of high adventure and style, and a deliberate injection of personal charm in the character of the protagonist played by Cary Grant.
Back in Britain, personal charm was being injected into the central character of Deighton's spy stories by the casting of the then-rising star, Michael Caine in two very good espionage pictures, The IPCRESS File and Funeral In Berlin (from 1965 and 1966). Further sequels, however, were very sadly lacking, despite Caines continued presence. The films maintain the seedy and duplicitous circumstances of the grimmer British spy flicks, but thanks to Caine's (and his character's) charm—and the scripts—there is a lightness of touch and a greater deployment of wit.
The blockbuster of the spy genre, it hardly needs saying, is the colossus of the James Bond franchise. Far less "realistic" than anything else mentioned heretofore, its attractions clearly lay in the colourful, exotic, and adventurous nature of the stories, the dramatic set pieces, and the allure of its star/protagonist to its female audience and its array of glamourous (but often doomed) Bond Girls to its male audience (though I'm not quite sure what to make of the presentation of sexual attraction followed by the death of the object of that attraction. That's a bit creepy). I'm not a huge fan of Bond films, though I can enjoy From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, License To Kill (though that's not really a spy film), and (especially) the more recent Casino Royale and Skyfall, which I genuinely find entertaining, caught on the right evening. The rest I have no interest in at all.
Of course, Bond opened the floodgates, particularly to a slew of television series aspiring to the glamour and exoticism of the 007 films, but on a shoestring. Actually, the first salvo predated Bond, with Patrick McGoohan starring in Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US) for Lew Grade's production company. I gather McGoohan had then been invited to audition for Bond by the producers based on the success of the ITC series and his portrayal in it, but he had no interest as he disapproved of the promiscuous nature and conscienceless violence of the central character. Instead, Grade gave him carte blanche to produce The Prisoner, a cult favourite that has never excited me as much as it has others, though its premise, quirkiness and visual style appealed.
ITC adjusted their formula over the years to produce various series with adventurers and freebooters and spy "teams". Their eventual decline in popularity, I suspect, had something to do with the changing circumstances of an increasingly prosperous British population. Captioned stock footage of European or even more exotic foreign locations, followed by a cut to the Elstree backlot (where directors showed their ingenuity by finding different angles to shoot a limited number of street corners) eventually palled, the general public increasingly able to embark on their own real adventures to the European continent for a vacation. The formula also became too familiar, so that even filming in actual continental locations in later series wasn't enough to retain the audience's interest.
Outside of Lew Grade's orbit, I need hardly mention The Avengers except to say that, of many contemporaries, it is to me the only series of the spy-fi kind that remains enjoyably and repeatedly watchable.
American series were also available to Britain (obviously), and so we had the opportunity to view The Man from UNCLE (and its sequel, The Girl), along with Mission: Impossible, I Spy and the outright comedy Get Smart. I was a huge fan of the UNCLE series and recall going to the cinema to see One of Our Spies is Missing, a movie apparently consisting of an elongated television episode (the supporting feature was The Man Called Flintstone, where Fred becomes embroiled in spying shenanigans). The Man from UNCLE's progressive descent into camp was unfortunate and a misstep as far as I was concerned. I wanted to take the show seriously. Even so, it benefited from charismatic leads, something that couldn't be said for Mission: Impossible which additionally suffered from the most repetitive formula of any TV programme I'd seen at that time. Of the others mentioned I recollect very little, and I doubt I was a regular viewer of either. Whether that was because of a lack of interest on my part, or because of scheduling or some other reason, I couldn't say all these years later.
I have never seen anything of the Mission: Impossible movie franchise and so cannot make comment, but I like the 2015 movie of The Man from UNCLE, well cast and with enough wit and excitement to secure engagement. It's messy storytelling, but Cavill, Hammer and Alicia Vikander are all splendid in their roles and Hugh Grant playing Waverley as Hugh Grant is somehow perfect.
Bond, even outside of Roger Moore's tenure in the part, sometimes stretched exaggeration of reality into self-parody. Inevitable, then, that this trajectory was continued and accelerated in its imitators. As said, for me it ultimately ruined some series. The 1960s presentations that worked least well for me were those featuring the characters Derek Flint and Matt Helm (James Coburn and Dean Martin, respectively): it seemed pointless to me, perhaps even as outright comedy, that a project tending towards spoof in its original incarnation should then be spoofed. It's still a phenomenon, as witness the Johnny English, Austin Powers and Kingsman films (though the Bond franchise has definitely sobered up).
The fascination for a grittier view of espionage persisted all the same. British television depicting the Cold War, as well as offering escapism, also proffered the darker aspect of the clandestine conflict.
Owing much to Le Carré were two notable series: The Rat Catchers and Callan. As might be expected, the unpleasant side of espionage, including extrajudicial assassination, was given additional dramatic tension by the injection of characters of conscience. The former series paired a suave but cold-blooded operative with a former policeman troubled by the tactics of his new employers (Gerald Flood and Glyn Owen, respectively). Similar in tone and content to The Rat Catchers was the 1972 series Spy Trap.
Better remembered (and helped by the fact that—unlike many early British television series that have been literally erased from record—it still substantially exists) is Callan, which starred Edward Equalizer Woodward in the title role. Echoing Deighton as well as Le Carré, the main character is working class, a former NCO in the army, rescued from a prison sentence by the usefulness of his talents gained in combat and crime. He's an expert shot and an efficient and resourceful executioner, but it doesn't sit well with his conscience, and this obviously creates tension with his superiors. Beginning in a one-off television play in 1967 (A Magnum for Schneider), the broadcast spawned a series that ran for several seasons until 1972. a low-key movie of the same name went on general cinematic release in 1974 (although it was novelised as Red File for Callan): basically a reworking of the initial TV play, as had been the first episode of the series proper. The series and character were well-remembered enough for a revisitation in a very lacklustre TV movie (Wet Job) in 1981. During the series' run Callan was brainwashed, murdered his superior under that influence, was subsequently shot by his sadistic colleague, and was later arrested, imprisoned and brutally treated by the KGB in the USSR. Thoughtful and character led, I thought it was great stuff. Watching re-runs reveals the usual technical issues of all 1960s multi-camera, semi-studio-bound drama, and the pacing and editing are no match for modern productions. All the same, I retain a respect for the show, and most especially for Woodward's co-star, Russell Hunter, who portrays a cowardly, naïve, petty criminal accomplice who as such—somewhat appropriately—steals every scene he's in.
Having now strayed into the 1970s one has to mention the BBC's BAFTA-winning adaption of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, featuring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, rooting out a mole in the security services in a labyrinthine work somewhat inspired by the real-life Cambridge spy ring. Definitely a slow burn, it kept us all captivated for the duration. It was, as everyone knows, followed by a miniseries of Smiley's People. The Russian master spy pitted against Smiley there is, of course, Karla, portrayed by a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart. Le Carré himself expressed his satisfaction with the series and especially with Guinness' portrayal.
Glasnost achieved its apotheosis in 1990, as the Berlin Wall tumbled. The Cold War began to be regarded as history and presumed dead. A kind of nostalgia associated with relief at its demise showed itself, and in that spirit, a comedy drama appeared on British screens in 1991, the miniseries Sleepers. With good performances from its leads Nigel Havers and, especially, the now-late but always wonderful Warren Clarke, it's a fine encapsulation of the times, with Thatcherite greed in the City of London and difficult industrial relations as industries shrank and disappeared to the frustration of workers, all as east/west relations thawed. It also includes tangential reference to the British fixation on their only World Cup football success in 1966. The protagonists, comfortably established in their lives in Britain (Havers' character as a big hitter in the City, Clarke's as a Trade Union representative in the industrial north), are in reality Soviet sleeper agents hoping their activation will never occur. The post-Glasnost discovery in Russia of a KGB programme, so secret that it baffles the KGB, accidentally activates the sleepers, who are keen to avoid any unwelcome duties and continue to enjoy their established lives. It's amusing, entertaining and, ultimately charming.
With the decline of the Red Menace, other opponents had to be found, often home-grown traitors after personal profit. Then came the devastating introduction of a new—very much real-world—threat.
There's a time and a place to discuss the wider, ethical aspects of western/middle eastern geopolitics, and this is neither time nor place. It's enough to say that we were introduced to an inexcusable, ethical monstrosity out of a clear blue sky.
I don't mean to be crass by continuing this screed, but it's a simple fact that a terrible event that occurred in actuality then provided an enemy to be portrayed in dramatic presentations in the position vacated (if apparently only briefly) by Russia. In the British Isles, of course, we were never short of such a substitute before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. We could always pit our fictional security service heroes against Irish terrorists of whichever faction (usually Nationalist rather than Unionist, though). Again, the wider political, ethical and human issues that accompanied the real-world situation are better left for another time. What this leads to in fictional drama is the 2002 BBC series Spooks (MI-5 in the US), wherein Peter Firth, Matthew McFadyen, Jenny Agutter, Keeley Hawes and Nicola Walker tried their best to defend us from fictitious insurgencies and plotting from all directions. And very glossy it was, too. The second episode became notorious for the alarming dispatch of a female officer by the agency of a commercial deep fryer. That caused ructions. Overall, I quite enjoyed the show (Jenny Agutter, Keeley Hawes and Nicola Walker? Of course I enjoyed it!) but it went on for longer than it should and I stopped watching a considerable while before it finished. At any rate, it was popular enough to beget a 2015 cinema release, Spooks: The Greater Good.
2002 also saw the release of The Bourne Identity and Matt Damon's portrayal of the perplexed but pugnacious protagonist. This has obviously become another successful franchise (and good luck to it), but I admit to having seen only the first instalment. It's a fairly standard thriller premise, but functional. In its cinematic incarnation, it's basically a framework on which to pin the fireworks. Lots of fireworks. Yes, one could say the same thing about Bond, but it seemed more evident to me, watching Bourne, than it did, say, watching Skyfall (the last Bond picture I've seen).
As the new geopolitical dynamic took shape, Fox/Showtime offered Homeland in 2011, a complex and riveting story of manipulation, dirty dealing, expediency, conflicting ideology and bipolar disorder. I can't praise the earlier seasons highly enough though, again, I'd say it went on for too long. Praise for Claire Danes, Damian Lewis and the rest of the ensemble cast was all very well deserved, and the unexpected twisting of plot was exemplary.
Post-Middle Eastern extraction and pre-Ukraine invasion, Cold War inspired content appeared to have been revitalised. Two recent British movies recall those days: Red Joan (2018), featuring Judi Dench, and The Courier (2020), featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. Both are inspired by or based on real events and persons. The former is the story of a pro-Russian agent, the latter of a pro-western agent, both somewhat naïve. The Courier is the better picture of the two, though an ex-colleague of mine has a bit-part in Red Joan. In similar vein from the US was the superior Bridge of Spies (filmed earlier, in 2015), featuring Tom Hanks. Did its success motivate the makers of the other two films?
Premiering on UK's Channel 4 in 2016, sometime after its release to other audiences, RTL/AMC/Sundance's German language miniseries Deutschland 83 was another backward look to the Cold War, giving us a Stasi spy infiltrating the army of West Germany to gain NATO secrets, but who blows his own cover to avert a shooting war. It was successful enough to inspire two further series, though I confess to not having seen the sequels. I'm not familiar with the cast, but the central character was played by a chap called Jonas Nay.
And now the ITV network is nearly at the close of its recent revisiting of the latest production of The IPCRESS File. I haven't read the source novel, but I can say that the miniseries differs significantly from the earlier movie. Again, it's been a very engaging and watchable drama with Joe Cole successfully taking ownership of the central character of Harry Palmer: not an easy task given Caine's still memorable portrayal. Lucy Boynton has been given a much more substantial role as Jean Courtney than Sue Lloyd was previously, and the whole has been given a more glamorous, globe-trotting narrative, while retaining the grit and class issues of the original. Very enjoyable.
Speaking (as I did) of McGoohan, and as an adjunct to my earlier comments on ITC's The Prisoner, I felt the AMC/ITV 2009 miniseries of The Prisoner with Jim/James Caviezel had promise but didn't quite hold together for the duration of its run, though Ian McKellen's character was compelling as an ostensibly benign face masking great menace: a good performance of sustained creepiness. Purist afficionados of the original series hated it, of course.
As far as I know, the US series Honey West was never broadcast in my home region in the 1960s and the only episode I have ever seen (only a few years ago on a dedicated repeats and nostalgia channel) was clearly based on The Avengers' episode The Cybernauts, at least as far as the opening scenes were concerned. Carbon copy. However, the rather effective and menacing androids of The Avengers were replaced by an appalling, cardboard box TV robot, complete (I think) with rotating antenna, and the rest of the narrative diverged into utter dross. Anne Francis was quite decorative, though.
A British series which now barely impinges on memory because of my age at the time of broadcast is Top Secret which starred William Franklyn (later making multiple appearances in The Avengers and The New Avengers). Broadcast in 1960-61 (when I was two-to-three years old), the main reason it holds even a tiny space in my recollection is that Franklyn—trading on his physical appearance in the series wearing a trench coat—featured in a long-lasting series of light-hearted TV commercials with a "spying" theme that advertised Schweppes' tonic water. If I correctly recall, it was his presence in the commercials that got the series cancelled as advertising rules on British television were pretty strict at the time and he was sacked because of his commercial participation. The only other remarkable thing about the series is that Laurie Johnson wrote the sig.
An interesting curiosity was The BBC's early 70s, two-season series, The Lotus Eaters, which starred (Avengers alums) Wanda Ventham and Ian Hendry as a British couple, migrated to Crete. The first season suggests "Cumbermum" Ventham's character has a secret, while her husband is a philandering soak. Mostly it explores their new surroundings and the characters who inhabit their part of the island. Season two reveals Wanda as a sleeper agent (with an oblivious Hendry taken on as cover) and features rather surreal passages as the forgotten reality percolates back into Wanda's subconscious.
Also from that decade is 1972's semi-comedic Spyder's Web which featured Patricia Cutts (an actress of whom I know little), Anthony Ainley (a presence in The Avengers' episode Noon Doomsday), Veronica Carlson (a Hammer scream queen), and Roger Lloyd-Pack (later most famous—and hilarious—as Trigger in the Britcom Only Fools and Horses). I don't remember a single story from the series.
In A Perfect Spy (1987), with Peter Egan (who had played a character in the movie of Callan some years earlier, replacing the TV series actor Anthony Valentine as cool sadist Toby Meres) and Ray McAnally (a veteran of two Avengers episodes), the BBC produced another gripping TV adaption of Le Carré. Interestingly, the central character's father is shown to be a con artist, and it makes one wonder whether recollections of his own father fed into that aspect of Le Carré's narrative.
In the cinema, brief mention might be in order for The Quiller Memorandum, a 1966 film featuring George Segal and Max Von Sydow, (which had a little style but not much substance. An eponymous BBC TV series based on the Quiller character in the 1970s was even more lacklustre, despite the casting of the versatile Michael Jayston, and lasted only one season. So little remembered, it has but two user reviews on IMDB). Danger Route, a 1967 picture with The Haunting's Richard Johnson as lead is a completely flaccid effort lacking both content or style, an object lesson in how not to ape either Bond or darker examples of the genre. 1975's Three Days Of The Condor, with Robert Redford as a CIA operative returning to his office to find his colleagues murdered is, on the other hand, another compelling thriller with good performances.
On t'other side of the equation is a rare Hitchcock dud: Torn Curtain (1966), this time an unambiguously Cold War tale. It suffers badly from the miscasting of its leads, their uninspired performances and their lack of any interpersonal chemistry. Paul Newman has made many better pictures and Julie Andrews has only ever shone in musicals or musical comedies, in most other respects being merely pretty and pretty wet. The film is overlong for its plot, and only one scene carries conviction and tension, a taught scene involving the killing of an East German antagonist which—for all its 1960s restraint—gives a more realistic idea of how difficult it is to actually kill a human being than most bang-you're-dead action films.
Brit actor Dirk Bogarde starred in two modest espionage films: The Mind Benders (1963) and the much superior Sebastian (1968). In the first, directed by the often-capable Basil Dearden, he plays a scientist subjecting himself to brainwashing techniques, second (directed by David Greene and produced by the much praised [and also much criticised] film maker Michael Powell) he plays a cryptographer in British Intelligence. The latter is a film with characters of mixed motives and realistically inconsistent personal judgement and was written by former real-life SOE cryptographic superstar Leo Marks.
The 1980s gave us the unbelievable, plodding, The Fourth Protocol (with Deighton alumnus Michael Caine, and Fleming alum Pierce Brosnan as principal goody and baddie, and with many another familiar face from various earlier spy pictures). Thankfully, the decade also gave us The Falcon and the Snowman in 1985. An early outing for Sean Penn and based on a real case, the film contrasted the misguided idealism and the shallow and selfish cupidity in its two central characters. It also had a soundtrack by the Pat Metheny Group, probably at the height of their popularity at the time (and adding David Bowie's vocals [and lyrics] to Metheny's title song, This is Not America, can't have hurt publicity for the movie at all).
The retrospective, real-events-based Argo, released in 2012, demonstrated very ably that, however inconsistent his judgement in his choice of film roles, Ben Affleck's skills as actor and director are themselves undeniable. This is a good film of a historical operation to liberate American diplomats from the then-relatively-new theocratic regime in Iran.
The theme of duplicity in the Middle East also gave us 2005's Syriana, starring George Clooney. This is a picture that really delves into the complexities of public versus covert international relationships, delivering a labyrinthine story from the perspectives of various players. Its densely woven narrative is worthy of Le Carré or, even more appropriately, Graham Greene.
Speaking of Greene, after namechecking the author in my earlier email I have said little so far of his oeuvre, though much of it has been committed to celluloid. In fact, of the authors I named, he is the one I have most read in print: I've never picked up a book by Fleming or (less understandably) Deighton and have only read two books by Le Carré, one of which was not an espionage tale. Greene's experience in the secret service and as journalist must have played into the following filmed works:
The Quiet American has been twice-filmed—1958's production starring Audie Murphy as proto-CIA man Pyle and Michael Redgrave as journalist Fowler, and 2002's production (which I haven't seen) featuring Brendan Fraser as Pyle and Michael Caine as Fowler. Set in French Indo-China/Vietnam, the novel warns against the meddling in affairs of developing nations by superior powers, and how misguided good intentions bring undesirable results. The book was felt to be anti-American in the US, the first of the two films delivering a more positive view of their involvement. I'm told that the remake reverted to the original caution against unintended consequences.
1959's Our Man in Havana is ostensibly a comedy (again with a deeply submerged and more serious "don't f*ck about with other people's business" message) featuring Alec "Smiley" Guinness as a vacuum cleaner salesman co-opted into espionage in Cuba by Her Majesty's Government.
The Human Factor, directed by Otto Preminger and released in 1979, is a more serious affair featuring Nicol Williamson, Richard Attenborough, Derek Jacobi and—skiing somewhat off-piste—Robert Morley (an actor probably better known for his comedic roles). In this, senior MI6 personnel identify a mole in their South African section and intend to kill the suspect rather than risk further compromise. They have it wrong, of course.
They're films that I like, though some are better than others. Greene's tendency is to examine the motives and actions of characters in the narrative who are directly or indirectly, deliberately or co-incidentally, knowingly or innocently involved in official but covert work, with guilt often being an important motivator or inhibitor of behaviour.
Back to the telly. Broadcast in the late 1970's into the early 1980s, The Sandbaggers was a series that I actually didn't catch at the time. As this coincides with my time at art school, my subsequent early employment in London and my meeting of my wife-to-be, I'm not at all surprised I missed it: I was too occupied with other things to watch much television.
Anyway, having somewhat belatedly popped onto my RADAR, I decided to give it a watch and see what I thought of it through a modern viewer's eye.
First of all, The Sandbaggers predates the significant changes in British television production that followed only a few years later in the 1980s, so (like other series that I namechecked earlier in the notes) it was shot using a variety of media and methods. Most interiors were recorded in studio on video, shot multi-camera. There was, however, a significant amount of film, shot single-camera for location and action work—albeit only grainy 16mm. Viewed by modern audiences this mix is distracting and would now be unacceptable. Editing methods for film and video also being pronouncedly different additionally mismatches those media. But that's how things were in British TV at the time, and I readily forgive it.
The signature tune and graphics are shockingly cheap and awful, even though the former was composed by Roy Budd, who also wrote the theme for Michael Caine's star vehicle, Get Carter. Since location filming took place in Europe as well as Britain, perhaps there simply wasn't the budget for other, less important incidentals.
Like many British TV dramas of the day, the narratives are dialogue-heavy (perhaps like most British TV dramas, period?), but given the corkscrew complexities of the devious plots this is hardly surprising. In this world of espionage, the rivalries, intricacies and deceits between international allies, governmental departments, ambitious or traitorous individuals and even personal friends are legion (indeed constant). Internecine deception is the norm. And, as ever within such British dramas, the endless cutting of UK government budgets is a recurring narrative theme, impacting the efficiency of the protagonists and making petty bureaucracy an additional enemy of people with more important concerns, eg life and death (see also comedy drama Sleepers, above, for more of this theme).
Despite wordiness, there is action in evidence (though possibly not enough to excite some audiences, then or now) and there are stories of betrayal, escape, defection, assassination and the semi-surprising deaths of series regulars. It's not without wit, either, in the interactions of some characters, though humour in the show tends toward the ironical.
Most players in the series are very reliable and well-known Brit character actors, with a very young Sue Holderness ("Marlene" from the sitcom Only Fools and Horses) playing a regular office staff member. The star of the piece is the respected thesp Roy Marsden, who went on to lead in many another top-rated show, notably in his 15-year stint as Dalgliesh in PD James' popular murder mysteries (he's also known for a turn in The New Avengers and playing one of the villainous "Driscoll brothers"—also in Only Fools and Horses!). My wife and I saw him perform twice on the London stage, starring first at the Mermaid Theatre, in Vanbrugh's Restoration Comedy, The Relapse, and later at the Young Vic in Molière's The Miser).
Marsden plays Burnside, the D.Ops (Director of Operations) of a specialised unit within SIS (formerly known as MI6), at odds with the unimaginative attitudes and devious motives of his political and organisational masters, those attitudes and motives sometimes robbing Burnside of the means to support the operatives that deserve and expect his loyalty. To some extent he enjoys a special relationship with his American CIA allies (especially in the person of Ross [actor Bob Sherman]), who, bizarrely, often seem to be at his instant beck and call—except when they are stabbing him in the back. Obviously. Obstructive organisational circumstances often force Burnside into a position of being less than honest with his superiors and this obviously creates friction, antagonism being a regular feature of his working relationships. While it can be said he is a character that is wilfully lacking in interpersonal skills, especially with women, this is fortunately carried off quite well and is not merely the lazy stereotype of the big man overburdened with responsibilities that no-one understands.
The series ran for three seasons and, though quite slow to start, warms up well and holds the attention. I have enjoyed watching it. Ian Mackintosh was writer and, rather ironically in keeping with series themes, he mysteriously disappeared in a light aircraft somewhere off the Alaskan coast partway through writing the final episodes.
I should add that US reviews for the show were particularly positive at the time of broadcast, with one reviewer claiming that The Sandbaggers was "the best spy series in television history". That's a big claim, obviously more subjective than objective, and probably not strictly true. All the same, it's at least a demonstration that despite its 1970s/80s limitations it's a show with quite some merit.
Goodness. All those words and still no mention of Walk a Crooked Mile, a 1948 Cold War Noir film—as was Pickup on South Street (1953), a much better offering with the excellent Richard Widmark (though his best picture dealing with Cold War issues, IMO, is the military thriller The Bedford Incident, an incredibly tense and well-acted tale of cat-and-mouse manoeuvres between a Russian submarine and a US destroyer, reminiscent of Moby Dick but with a creatively realised cataclysmic ending), A Dandy in Aspic (1963) directed by Anthony Mann and again featuring the estimable Laurence Harvey, The Deadly Affair (a 1967 presentation of Le Carré's novel Call for the Dead, this time with James Mason as Smiley) helmed by one of my favourite directors, Sidney Lumet, and The Lives of Others (2006) directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, depicting the caustic effect of the Stasi's intrusion into and dominance over the lives of East German people. Well, I just can't include everything!