Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Does Well in North American Expansion

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, easily one of the best spy movies of recent years, expanded into more markets in North America this weekend, and entered the Top 10 at the box office at number 9... on just 809 screens, far fewer than any other film in the Top 10. That means it averaged an impressive $7,129 per screen (according to Box Office Mojo), the second highest per-screen average on the chart, well ahead of number 2 film Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. The Hollywood Reporter reports that "Tinker Tailor flourished in surburban markets--a theater in the surburbs north of Oklahama City was No. 5 in the country--as well as continuing to thrive in holdover art house locations." It's good to hear that there's demand for cerebral John le Carré adaptation outside of big cities, bearing out Roger Ebert's recent essay which pointed out things that should be obvious and partly blamed the 2011 box office slump on Hollywood's stupid misconception that "small-town moviegoers don't like 'art movies.'" I'm sure there's a lot more demand for the film in the markets it still hasn't opened in, too. Focus Features will continue to expand Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the weeks ahead, so if it hasn't played in your town yet, just be patient. It will. And you've got something truly special to look forward to!

Read my review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) here.
Read my introduction to George Smiley here.

Tradecraft: Rhona Mitra Joins Strike Back

Deadline reports that British actress Rhona Mitra will join the cast of Cinemax's Strike Back next season. (If you haven't watched the first season yet, though, you might not want to click on that link, as the trade blog's story contains plot spoilers.) Mitra is probably most famous as the model for Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider videogames during the height of their popularity, though more recently she's starred in films like Doomsday and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and the short-lived TV show The Gates. She's got some spy experience under her belt, too, having appeared in a small role in the Mark Wahlberg movie Shooter (review here), and in an episode of Barry Sonenfeld's flash-in-the-pan 2000 spy show Secret Agent Man (which was not a remake of ITC's Danger Man aka Secret Agent, despite sharing its theme song with that show's American title sequence). The new season of Strike Back starts shooting soon in South Africa.

Read my review of the Cinemax version of Strike Back here.
Read my review of the original UK version of Strike Back here.

Tradecraft: Seth Rogan Joins Disney Spy Comedy

Variety reports that Seth Rogan has come aboard to produce, and likely star in, the Disney spy comedy The B-Team. The story, by Derek Gulley and David Scneiderman, follows a spy's tech support team who must rise to the occasion and spring into action themselves to rescue him when the top agent goes missing. The project has been in development for several years, but Rogan's involvement is likely to spark further movement.

Thomas Newman to Score SkyFall?

MI6 is reporting that longtime Bond composer David Arnold (who is also the musical director of the London Olympics this year) will not score SkyFall (is the F capital? I'm not sure anymore), and longtime Sam Mendes collaborator Thomas Newman will. Hm. Well, that's... interesting. I'm a big Arnold fan myself, and I'll be sorry and nervous to see him step aside for a film (hopefully he'll return to the series in the future), but after five straight Arnold scores (another and he would have tied John Barry's longest streak, which he's already got beat in terms of years), I'm also curious to hear another take. There are just a lot of composers I would have been far more eager to see try their hand at 007 than Newman. Nothing against him, mind you. He's a great composer who's earned ten well-deserved Oscar nominations. I've just never heard him do anything that made me think he'd be appropriate for Bond. (Though I never thought that about Alexandre Desplat, either, until I heard his extremely Bondian Largo Winch music, so you never know.) But he's certainly got range, so I expect he'll deliver something thrilling and appropriate. He's got a few spy movies under his belt, too, though neither are remotely Bondian. In fact, I found his score for The Debt pretty underwhelming and fairly generic as modern spy music goes:



No, I don't want that sound. But his score for Steven Soderbergh's period spy movie The Good German (review here), while not remotely appropriate for 007, demonstrates clearly that Newman is more than capable of adapting to an existing style. In this case, it's a 1940s style:



And I'll admit I'm not super familiar with his whole oeuvre; he's not a composer I've ever followed that closely. When he's made an impression on me, it's usually been with dramatic scores that tug the heartstrings, like WALL*E or Mendes' American Beauty. But try nine minutes or twelve minutes into this Adjustment Bureau suite for some surprisingly atypical action music. I'm not saying that's what I'd want for Bond, but I am saying that it demonstrates a range not hinted at in some of his more purely romantic scores.

Of course, so far this is just a scoop on MI6 with no source credited. We won't know if he's on board for sure until there's some sort of official announcement. But given his history with the director, I'd say it's highly likely. Overall, as much as I like David Arnold's work, it's exciting to have a fresh take on Bond music again. Usually when John Barry stepped away from his semi-regular duties, the results were more dated scores like Bill Conti's For Your Eyes Only or Marvin Hamlisch's The Spy Who Loved Me, but dated or not, some of those non-Barry outings yielded spectacular results. (I'm particularly partial to George Martin's Live and Let Die, and Conti's music has grown on my over the years.) Other times, they've resulted in Eric Serra's GoldenEye. I'm hoping SkyFall proves to be more of the former... but most of all that it proves to be classic Bond.

Upcoming (Non-) Spy DVDs: Pierce Brosnan's U.S. Debut

I've long wanted to see Pierce Brosnan's U.S. TV debut, the pre-Remington Steele miniseries The Manions of America... and very shortly, I'll be able to, thanks to eOne Entertainment. TV Shows On DVD reports that eOne will release the 286-minute 1981 miniseries about the Irish immigrant experience in America as a 2-DVD set on February 28. The SRP is $29.98, though it can currently be pre-ordered on Amazon for slightly less than that. Brosnan (around the time that Cubby Broccoli supposedly commented on the set of For Your Eyes Only that "if that man can speak with a British accent, he's our next James Bond" or something to that effect) co-stars with Kate Mulgrew (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins), Linda Purl (Under Cover - hm, there's one I'd like to see on DVD) and Simon MacCorkindale (The Riddle of the Sands, Counterstrike - and there's another!).

Best of 2011: Television

As with spy movies, 2011 was an excellent year for spy TV, too. There may not have been quite as many new spy series as last year (but then again, maybe there were), but the ones we got were pretty darn good for the most part. Additionally, the right shows from last year (Archer, Covert Affairs, Nikita) were renewed, and came back strong. (Well, the first two did, anyway. Nikita hasn't quite found its footing since the big shakeup at the end of Season 1.) Once again, there's such an embarrassment of riches that rather than just saying that Page Eight or Homeland are the best TV of the year, I can make individual categories, like the Emmies.

Best New Spy TV Show of 2011 - Homeland

I have to admit up front: I'm behind. I haven't yet seen the entire first season of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa's Showtime drama Homeland. Perhaps it takes a 24-style dive in quality in the second half of the season. I hope not, though, and I don't expect it to based on the strength of the early episodes, which are compelling enough on their own for me to make this selection. Gordon and Gansa successfully dial down their frenetic 24 pacing to create a slow-build spy drama that devotes an entire season (and possibly an entire series) to the question of whether or not an American (in this case a rescued POW played by Damien Lewis) is an enemy agent. That's quite a feat after 24 raised and answered that question on an almost weekly basis (to the point of absurdity), its spy agency (CTU) more rife with moles than Kim Philby's MI6. When this cable show, a remake of an Israeli series, was first announced, I wondered how it could possibly perpetuate its Manchurian Candidate setup into an entire season, let alone an entire series, but Gordon and Gansa answered that question right off the bat in a truly terrific pilot: the way television should sustain a season, with rich, compelling characters. Lewis' Sgt. Nicholas Brody may well be a terrorist, but Gansa, Gordon and director Michael Cuesta still make us care about him and even identify with him. Would you have expected that from the producers of 24? Claire Danes' CIA agent Carrie Mathison, meanwhile, is so troubled she makes Queen & Country's Tara Chace seem well-adjusted. She's obsessive. She's on anti-psychotic medications, and hiding her condition from the Agency. She blames herself for 9/11. And, like many a fictional spy before her but in a much more pathetic light, she seeks refuge from her troubles in a parade of compulsive, anonymous sexual encounters. (She even wears a wedding ring to ward off potential relationship-seekers.) Danes compiles all of these severe character flaws into a character you can't take your eyes off of, the first TV spy tailor-made for cable. And those are just the leads. Virtually every character on screen is well-developed, with only David Harewood's Deputy CIA Director ringing a cliched note. Homeland is as compelling as television gets.

Honorable Mention

Cinemax's Strike Back (full review here), another cable show, may not be the intelligent action drama that its UK progenitor was, but it's thoroughly watchable in its own right, offering the opposite of what Homeland gives us: instead of well-rounded characters, we get mindless action, preposterous stunts and frequent nudity... and sometimes that's exactly what we want. Strike Back delivers it with style. I can't quite tell where I stand on CBS's Person of Interest, starring Jim Caviezel as a former CIA agent who pools his spy know-how with Michael Emerson's infinite resources to help New York's helpless, Equalizer-style. It's The Equalizer meets Batman, and that's a pretty cool combo. Some episodes are great. Others are quite terrible. It doesn't really deserve an honorable mention most of the time, but I wanted to say something about it and this seemed like the appropriate place.

Best Spy TV Movie or Miniseries - Page Eight

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of my two picks for Best Spy Film of the Year, didn't have a monopoly on all-star casts among serious British spy dramas this year. An almost equally all-star ensemble could be seen on TV (on BBC in England, and on PBS's Masterpiece Contemporary in America) in David Hare's adult drama Page Eight, including Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Judy Davis and Ewen Bremner. Nighy stars as a senior MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker whose life is thrown upside down when his boss gives him a secret document whose eighth page contains a bombshell big enough to bring down the government and then dies before instructing him on what, exactly, he wanted him to do with this intelligence. Simultaneously to these events, he's just met the perfect woman in his next door neighbor, played by Weisz. But Worricker's been in the spy game too long to believe in coincidences. Is he right to be suspicious? Or will paranoia rob him of the best thing he's ever stumbled into? This is espionage of the serious, slow-moving school at it's very best. The action plays out deliberately on the faces of these veteran thespians in the form of sidelong glances that say more than monologues instead of in car chases and gunfights. And we get plenty of that class-conscious in-fighting and office politics that I love in this sort of British desk spy story. Page Eight is that rare class of TV movie that just as easily could have been theatrical, and fans of John le Carré and Len Deighton should eat it up.

Best Returning Spy TV Show - Archer

There's not much new that I can say about Archer that I didn't say when I picked it as last year's best new show, but I do find it impressive that the writers managed to maintain the high level of quality in its second season. That's particularly tough for a parody series. The secret, of course, is that Archer is much more than a mere spy parody. It's a dysfunctional family comedy that happens to be set in a spy agency. As I said before, the extremely raunchy humor is definitely not for all tastes, but if it is to your liking, you'll no doubt appreciate the excellent animation and cool spy style on top of the gags. As for the parody side, there are a lot of great pop culture parodies (yes, actual, clever parodies and not mere Family Guy-style references), and not just to spy movies. As a life-long Magnum, P.I. fan, my head nearly exploded when one episode, "Placebo Effect," ended with a lengthy, nearly line-for-line recreation of one of the most memorable Magnum endings. "Did You See the Sun Rise" is classic television that deserves much more of a place in the history of the medium than it gets, but unlike some of the more famous Miami Vice moments, doesn't seem to be that well known outside of a core group of Magnum fans. For those that do know it, though, that Archer reference will blow your mind. What other show would even greenlight such a thing? Of course, the end of "Placebo Effect" works just fine for viewers who aren't familiar with the Magnum episode. As it should, in any good parody. I just happen to be a Magnum fan, but I'm sure I'm probably missing other, equally obscure references on Archer. But I don't feel like I'm losing out, because the show is so consistently funny no matter what level you appreciate it on.

Honorable Mention

Covert Affairs also came back strong. But I'm about to talk about that below...

Best Spy TV Episode - Covert Affairs - "Uberlin"

There were a lot of good episodes of spy television this year, but the Berlin-set second season episode of Covert Affairs demonstrated why that USA show deserves to be taken seriously as spy TV. Writer Erica Shelton offered everything spy fans could ask for from a good spy show, or even movie: real Berlin locations, Cold War intrigue, assets with dubious loyalties, and even some action in the form of a pretty cool car chase. I love the way that this show uses actual foreign locations—and uses them well. Producer Doug Liman (director of The Bourne Identity) told a Comic-Con crowd this year that it's frequently just him and a camera on these foreign shoots, shooting guerrilla style, but in the case of "Uberlin" episode director Jonathan Glassner clearly deserves at least some of the credit. I don't know how much of the episode was actually shot in the German capital, but Glassner uses whatever bits were to clearly create the impression that it all was. Plus, the episode made full use of the show's most undervalued asset: Peter Gallagher. The plot found his CIA honcho forced back into the field for one assignment alongside Annie Walker (Piper Perabo).

Honorable Mention

As I said, there were a lot of good episodes this year. The second season premiere of Archer was a standout in a series that nearly always delivers the goods, showcasing both the show's raunchy humor and stylish animated action in a hilarious episode that combined alpine spyjinks like snowmobile chases and ski chalets with a running gag about an underage celebutante throwing herself at Archer. The pilot of Homeland, as I mentioned above, was also stellar. It did everything a pilot should, clearly establishing the show's characters and making the audience care about them in only an hour while at the same time putting into motion a complex ongoing plot. Nikita also deserves mention for its penultimate Season 1 episode, "Betrayal," which perfectly paid off a season's worth of plot threads in an exciting build-up to a final confrontation between Nikita and division. The actual finale, unfortunately, didn't quite deliver on the promise of "Betrayal," as it scrambled to get its ducks in a row for Season 2. It's ironic, but had the series been cancelled after a single season it might have delivered a more satisfying finale.

Worst of 2011

As with all of this year's spy movies, this TV season was really good enough to avoid any real Worst Of contenders. The worst script I read was for the pilot of Fox's Exit Strategy, but that didn't make it to air. (And, I have to admit, the actual filmed pilot marked an improvement on the script... though it still didn't merit a pickup.) ABC's Sixties-set spying stewardess series Pan-Am didn't compel me to tune in beyond the first few episodes, but it didn't outright stink either. Mainly, the non-spy elements weren't that compelling to me. So with no Under Covers on the schedule, I'm going to give the networks a pass as well and not anoint a Worst Series this year. (If we venture slightly outside the spy perimeters, though, that revival of Charlie's Angels was the worst television I've seen in years! Luckily, I've already forgotten it.)

Still to come: the best and worst spy DVDs of 2011... and a look ahead at the coming year. Check back soon!

Best of 2011: Movies

Happy New Year!

2011 has been a truly banner year for spy entertainment across the board. In movies alone, I think we've had more of them in 2011 than in any other year since I started this blog in 2006. But it wasn't just quantity; it was an overall year of quality, too. Some years, the pickings have been fairly slim in choosing a best spy movie of the year, but 2011 has offered an embarrassment of riches for fans of the genre. There have been enough good ones that in another year, something like Hanna or X-Men: First Class might have easily grabbed the top honors. But not this year. I could probably even make a Top 10 list rather than choosing a single winner. And, as it happens, I'm not choosing a single winner. It's a tie.

Best Spy Movies of 2011: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Since it was first announced over two years ago, director Tomas Alfredson's feature film adaptation of the classic John le Carré novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (previously made as an excellent 1979 BBC miniseries) has flown high on my radar. I've breathlessly followed the lengthy casting process, which packed the film with star after star, and barely contained my anticipation as Europeans had the chance to see the film months ahead of its U.S. release. Reviews out of the UK were stellar, as expected. As a serious contender for Best Picture, overall, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy seemed almost preordained to achieve the top spot on a list of best spy films of the year. But it was never a given. Alfredson was adapting my favorite novel of all time, a dense and complex work that had previously barely been contained in a 7-hour miniseries, into a 2-hour feature. Could he possibly satisfy dedicated fans of the novel? Yes he did—thrillingly. (Read my full review here.) We couldn't have hoped for a better film version of the story, and now all my hopes turn towards further Smiley films from the same team.
Far less preordained was that I'd be equally thrilled by the fourth film in the Tom Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible franchise. I absolutely love the TV show upon which these films are ostensibly based, but I haven't loved any of the previous films in the series. Upon its initial release, I hated the first one (though I've since come round on it a bit), and the second was even worse. I did like the third one, but not enough to expect to enjoy the fourth anywhere near as much as I did. Sure, the casting was promising, but then there was that ridiculous title. Yet Brad Bird (The Incredibles), in his first live-action feature, delivered the most sheer fun in any spy film this year. Prior entries in this franchise have owed more to James Bond than the series whose theme music they share. Ghost Protocol, however, not only incorporates more aspects intrinsic to Mission: Impossible than the previous movies (including quite a few sly in-jokes for fans of the TV show), but also finally succeeds in out-Bonding Bond—at least for the moment. It delivers all the huge, larger-than-life, world-at-stake spy action that Quantum of Solace failed to. The much-hyped sequence with Cruise mountaineering about outside the tallest building in the world is itself worth the price of admission. I've seen it twice so far, and I can't wait to see it again. It's great stuff. (Watch for a full review soon.)

The fact that both of these spy movies were opening in the U.S. in the same month has fascinated me, since they perfectly represent the polar extremes of the spy genre. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a realistic, tightly-plotted, character-driven period thriller about loyalty, betrayal and office politics set mostly in the smoke-filled confines of a government bureaucracy, whereas Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is a silly, way over-the-top action movie filled with spectacularly improbable gadgets and deliriously impossible stunts. About all they have in common, interestingly, is that both movies begin with a mission going wrong in Budapest. But they're both undeniably spy movies, and together they represent just about everything I love about the genre—on both extremes. I kept trying to suss out which one I liked more, and finally realized it was a tie. A perfect tie. I couldn't be more satisfied.

Honorable Mention

As I mentioned above, either Joe Wright's stylish teen assassin movie Hanna or Matthew Vaughn's equally stylish paen to Sixties spy movies with superheroes, X-Men: First Class (review here), could have taken top honors in another, less crowded year. Both deserve to be seen. Neither Colombiana (review here) nor Killer Elite (review here) ever would have had a shot at the title, but both delivered exactly what I wanted from them in their respective corners of the genre. 2011 really was a very good year for spy films.

Worst of 2011

It was so good, in fact, that I don't actually have a pick for the Worst of the Year. The actual worst spy film of the year, qualitatively, was probably the Taylor Lautner vehicle Abduction, but even that was enough fun that I'd feel pretty churlish to actually saddle it with that demonstrative. The most disappointing spy movie of the year, for me, was probably The Debt. While I had no expectations whatsoever for Abduction, I had high hopes for The Debt (review here), since its pedigree included writers of both X-Men: First Class and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It fell seriously short of my expectations, but was by no means the worst of anything. So I'm not picking a worst spy film of 2011!

Stay tuned for a look at the best and worst spy television of the year...

Merry Christmas From the Double O Section!

H0 H0 HO7! Here's wishing all my readers a happy holiday, no matter which one you celebrate, filed with Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Man, dry eggnog martinis, and lots of spy gifts under the tree. I also hope you're able to tune in to the EPIX all-day James Bond marathon for at least a brief taste of 007, and if you're especially lucky, maybe able to make it out to a theater tonight to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. I'm traveling for the holidays, myself, and on a somewhat hectic schedule. (Hectic enough to be behind on reviews during a spy-filled movie season and to have missed my annual gift guide altogether this year, for which I'm sorry.) Since I didn't have time to think up a clever new Christmas post for 2011, instead I'll direct you to my 2006 Christmas post, from my very first year blogging, which offers some evergreen suggestions for holiday-themed spy viewing. And on top of that, I'll reprint this episode review from the Scarecrow and Mrs. King holiday episode “The Long Christmas Eve,” excerpted from my full review of that show's first season:

“The Long Christmas Eve” finds Amanda (Kate Jackson) trying out her homespun housewife wisdom on the KGB as well as the Agency, and her speech about the holiday spirit gets CIA and KGB agents to spend Christmas Eve together in a remote cabin in the woods and call a truce from trying to kill each other. Good thing, too, because WWIII seems about to break out with a whole unit of Russian soldiers on U.S. attacking American agents! Scarecrow's (Bruce Boxleitner) reaction to waking up to find Amanda serving hot chocolate to his enemy is priceless. This episode also gets points for another moment of Avengers-like weirdness when an assassin dressed in a Santa suit blows up a phone booth.

Happy Christmas to all!

Acorn's Man in a Suitcase: Set 2 to Include Richard Bradford Interview

Great news for American ITC fans! Acorn's previously announced second set of Man in a Suitcase will include a very big bonus feature: the 69-minute interview with star Richard Bradford that first appeared on Network's Region 2 DVD release (but was not found on the Region 4 Umbrella set). Bradford, who played the cool-as-ice burned spy turned private eye McGill in the 1967-68 series, was a perfectionist and a Method actor, which brought him into conflict with some members of the cast and crew and earned him a reputation for being "difficult." In this surprisingly candid interview from 2004, he speaks frankly and openly about those on-set clashes, as well as discussing his early days studying at Lee Strasberg's famous Actors Studio, working with his friend and fellow Method actor Marlon Brando, and more. If for some reason you needed further encouragement to buy the second and final collection of this top-notch Sixties spy show, this is it!

Read my review of Acorn's Man in a Suitcase: Set 1 here.

Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Part 2 of an ongoing series, "The Smiley Files," examining the career of George Smiley in literature and film. Read my introduction to Smiley here.

Tomas Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have done the impossible: they’ve boiled down John le Carré’s complex, nuanced, and epic 400-page novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy into a sleek feature film running just over two hours that still manages to retain the nuance and most of the complexity of the book. And, amazingly, they’ve done it in such a way that it moves at a brisk enough clip to never feel slow, but still allows the story enough breathing room that it never seems rushed, either. On top of all that, through some sort of unknowable alchemy, they’ve managed to retain all the most important plot points and nearly all the characters from the dense novel! Le Carré compared the process to turning a cow into an Oxo (bouillon) cube. The cube I'd compare this film to is a small box that somehow manages to hold an astounding amount of stuff inside. A box that, once unpacked, you can’t fathom how it possibly contained all those individual items, and you’re fairly sure you could never re-pack it so economically. That must have been what the process felt like for the writers and director. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, quite simply, a master class in the art of successfully adapting one medium to another.

Additionally, placed for comparison next to the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation of the same material (as its makers must have known it inevitably would be), the new version serves as an example of how the same material can be faithfully—and successfully—adapted in very different ways. John Irvin’s 7-hour miniseries, penned by Arthur Hopcraft, meticulously reproduced the novel almost chapter for chapter. Scenes in the miniseries played out almost exactly how they did in the book, yet it still managed to leave out enough things to distress die-hard fans of the novel, or to devote too little time to scenes that this reader thought should have been drawn-out, Hitchcockian setpieces (like Peter Guillam’s illicit retrieval of a secret file from the Circus library). The new film takes the opposite approach. The adapters alter almost every scene, some drastically, and restructure the entire plot so that it unfolds in a completely different (generally more chronological) order... yet still manage to retain the essence of the novel in, I would say, an even purer form. This time, there were no scenes from the novel whose absence I seriously lamented, and Alfredson highlighted every moment I wanted to see highlighted—including Guillam’s sneaky file snatch.

In a nutshell, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the story of a mole hunt in 1970s British Intelligence, an organization known colloquially to its lifelong employees as “the Circus.” A new regime takes over following a disastrous mission in Budapest (Czechoslovakia in the book) that results in the disgraceful ouster of the Service’s longtime chief, known only as Control (John Hurt, The Osterman Weekend), and his paladin George Smiley (Gary Oldman, The Dark Knight). The new chief is scowling Scotsman Percy Alleline (Toby Jones, Captain America) and his trusted lieutenants are Toby Esterhase (David Dencik, both versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth, Another Country) and Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds, Munich). When an errant “scalphunter” (slang for an itinerant field man who’s sent to do dirty work in trouble spots) named Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy, Inception) contacts the Circus’s cabinet overseer, Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney, Body of Lies) claiming to have evidence that one of these top men is a Soviet agent, Lacon hauls Smiley out of retirement to investigate Tarr’s claims. With the aid of scalphunter boss Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock), Smiley unravels an exceptionally cunning and devious, multi-layered plot orchestrated by his unseen opposite number in Moscow Center, the mysterious Karla. What he finds will not only take a terrible toll on the Circus itself, but also on Smiley’s personal life and wellbeing.

Smiley’s investigation consists largely of interviewing different people involved in the botched Budapest mission. While le Carré tends to have characters speak in circles around the most crucial facts in their story (leaving it to the deceptively sharp Smiley to pinpoint the pertinent details, or trap his interviewees into revealing them), the encounters in the movie are generally much more straightforward. And yet the overall plot is complex enough (yes, you will have to devote your full attention to this one) that the sheer number of stories and witnesses, and the mystery of their direct relation to the central question of the identity of the mole, adds up to the same air of practiced deception as the book, where nothing is quite as it seems because all of the characters have been trained to obscure facts by second nature, to cling to secrets—often without even realizing it. So that isn’t lost, and neither is Smiley’s impressive perception, since we witness it on a more macro level as he puts all the pieces together. (You barely even notice him assembling the larger pieces when reading the book, since you’re so engrossed in the smaller minutiae.)

In the movie, things happen differently, but really just more economically. Sure, as a fan of the novel (in fact I’d probably rate it as my favorite book ever), I miss Sam Collins (whose part is given to Jerry Westerby, another character from the novel) and Fawn (whose role is mostly rolled in with Mendel’s), and I really wish that Stephen Fry had had an opportunity to play Roddy Martindale (as far as I know that was never actually mooted; I just would have liked to see it!), but it’s fairly obvious to see why those small characters were cut. Impressively, the vast majority of the book’s very large cast do make it into the movie—even some you wouldn’t expect. There’s Roach, still keeping watch for his favorite teacher, and even former Special Branch detective Mendel’s bees make an appearance. Quite a lengthy one, in fact, which was unexpected but rewarding. When Smiley and Guillam collect Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack) to join their team, they all pile into a small car together along with one of the bees. Alfredson holds the wordless scene for a surprisingly long time, as the bee buzzes around the car’s interior, much to Guillem’s annoyance, before finally making its way out a window that Smiley cracks for it. That little moment may seem like an odd one to dwell in, but it’s representative of how Alfredson lets his film breathe even with so much material to pack into a relatively short running time. The buzzing bee provides not only a moment of levity, but also nicely physicalizes the tension of the situation. There are plenty such moments in Alfredson’s film.

Other new scenes added just for the film serve similar purposes. We’re now treated to flashbacks of a Circus Christmas party, for example, which not only provides further moments of humor (many courtesy of John Hurt, whose Control gets nearly as riled up by the weakness of the punch as he does later about the traitor in his organization), but also ably stands in by itself for dozens of other flashbacks in the book which establish the key relationships between all the main players in happier times. Additionally, the Christmas party scene rewards die hard spy fans with a cameo from le Carré himself and, remarkably, a musical reference to a very obscure Eurospy film! I honestly never, ever thought I’d see George Smiley and Bill Haydon and Connie Sachs and Control singing boisterously along with Sammy Davis Jr.’s tongue-in-cheek theme song from Lindsay Shonteff’s The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World! (Writer Straughan revealed at a Q&A following the screening I attended that the idea for a Circus Christmas party came from le Carré’s recollections of real MI5 office Christmas parties that got out of hand.)

Alfredson and his team meticulously recreate Seventies London from its dire fashions and hair to the cars to the smoke-filled conference rooms of the ramshackle Circus headquarters. The movie never goes for obvious, beat-you-over-the-head Seventies pop culture shorthand, either (which is to say, we don’t see Smiley shuffling past a group of platform shoed Ziggy Stardust wannabes or see Guillam rocking a Brett Sinclair ascot—though he does kind of sport the real world equivalent), but instead focuses on the every day mundanity of the era. Alfredson’s Seventies isn’t the Seventies we see on ITC shows of the era, which were desperate to celebrate their times with the most outrageous fashions and furniture; it’s the Seventies of middle-aged civil servants who probably had zero awareness of any cultural shift going on around them as they focused on the geopolitical shifts instead, and worried about their under-heated offices or weak coffee.

The actors embody those middle-aged civil servants pretty uniformly perfectly. John Hurt makes the most of his limited scenes, capturing not only the intense paranoia and monomania of his character, but also imbuing Control with an irascible sense of humor not found in the books. Toby Jones also earns some good laughs (much needed, to relieve the overall tension—which is as palpable as the clouds of cigarette smoke that fill the Circus’s soundproof conference room) as Alleline. More than anyone else, he is le Carré’s character sprung to life from the pages of the book. Ciaran Hinds probably makes a wonderful Roy Bland, too, but it’s kind of hard to tell. It’s pretty clear that most of his scenes must have ended up on the cutting room floor, which is too bad. Colin Firth delivers his usual reliable performance as the sort of upper-class, Oxbridge Englishman he could no doubt play in his sleep, but adds a lecherous touch one might not expect of Mr. Darcy or that stuttering King. David Dencik offers a very different—but equally valid—interpretation of Hungarian “Lamplighter” Toby Esterhase (the Circus’s resident expert in spy tradecraft) from the miniseries’ Bernard Hepton. In an effort to get out of the stuffy interiors that dominate Smiley’s world in the books, Alfredson relocates Smiley’s tense interview with Esterhase to an airstrip, adding an unmistakable air of menace and making for one of the movie’s best scenes.

Smiley in any incarnation is capable of such ruthless, menacing tactics when they’re called for, but Gary Oldman wears his ruthless streak on his sleeve a bit more than his predecessors. His Smiley is quiet and still put-upon, but he’s more obviously in command of most situations than Alec Guinness or James Mason. In the past, Smiley’s vulnerability has been at the forefront, making the bursts of ruthlessness surprising. With the reverse true, here, Oldman makes the most of a surprising moment of vulnerability. When he relates to Guillam the story of his first and only meeting with Karla, his lifelong nemesis, Alfredson doesn’t cut to a flashback the way the miniseries did. Instead, he moves his camera in close on Oldman, and lets the actor deliver a lengthy monologue uninterrupted. It’s not often that we watch an actor tell a story like this for such a long time on screen, and Oldman relishes the opportunity. Without the camera to do it for him, he alone must convey all the nuances of that long ago confrontation in which Smiley lost a prized cigarette lighter, inscribed to him by his wife Ann with all her love, to Karla. It’s his relationship with Ann that exposes Smiley at his most vulnerable and most human in every version of the character, and since we never see Ann’s face in this movie (like Karla), it falls to Oldman to express that himself, which he does very successfully. Alec Guinness has had too many years in which to own the role of Smiley to ever be robbed of that claim, but Oldman certainly gives him a good run for his money in a mesmerizing and Oscar-worthy performance. Like Guinness, he utterly disappears into the role. On occasion, when I deliberately took myself out of the thoroughly engaging movie in order to evaluate it as it progressed, I had to remind myself that that was Gary Oldman on screen. When you lose yourself to the film, you only see Smiley.

The younger stars also hold their ground ably against such formidable veterans. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a fine Peter Guillam, and the extra-textual irony of TV’s current Sherlock Holmes playing Smiley’s Watson is enjoyable as well. Unlike the character of the books and previous screen versions, this Peter Guillam is gay. That seems, out of context, to be one of the movie’s most major departures from the source material, but like all the changes it actually makes sense in the context of the film. Like so many seemingly questionable changes to the source material, it proves to be a helpful shorthand, in this case to portray the dear personal price this character pays for his career in one scene what took le Carré many vignettes in the book. Tom Hardy, too, delivers a particularly impressive performance as Ricki Tarr, a rogue in love. (Plus, he looks better in his semi-hilarious Seventies wig than he does with his current real haircut!)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not only a near-perfect adaptation; it’s also a near-perfect spy movie. Alfredson and his team have successfully interpreted John le Carré’s dense text into a movie that retains all of the book’s twists and turns, all of its themes, and nearly all of its rich and memorable characters into a film that stands on its own merits. Even if the book had never existed, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would be a prime example of what the serious side of the spy genre can be at its best. In the Sixties, slower-paced, more adult, more cerebral spy movies like this coexisted peacefully with the action-packed Bond movies and their imitators. Today, possibly thanks to the end of the Cold War, the Bond and Bourne side of the genre (which Alfredson acknowledges not only with his tongue-in-cheek appropriation of the Sammy Davis Jr. song, but also by arming Smiley with a Walther PPK in the movie’s climax) thrives, but the serious spy movie has languished. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (as well as TV’s Page 8) proves that it doesn’t have to. I hope this film is successful and leads not only to subsequent Smiley adaptations starring Gary Oldman, but also to a resurgence of smart, complex spy films for adult audiences—and of Cold War period pieces, for that matter. The Cold War was never the raison d'être for the books of le Carré, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, Anthony Price and countless others; it was an expedient (and, then, timely) dramatic device through which to explore universal themes of loyalty and betrayal. And as Alfredson’s film proves, it still is.

The Smiley Files
Read my introduction to the character of George Smiley here.

Original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Comes to Blu-ray Next Year

In 2012, Acorn will release the classic 1979 BBC miniseries version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring the incomparable Alec Guinness, on Blu-ray in the USA. It will mark the seminal John le Carré adaptation's debut in the high-def format. Not only that, but it will also include a brand new interview with director John Irvin. This Blu-ray release will stick to the six-part version of the series that American viewers are familiar with (and which Acorn reckon works better... and they may have a point there), but there's a good possibility that the cut scenes from the longer UK version will be included as bonus material, affording fans the vest of both worlds. Full details will come in the New Year, but this is definitely a release to be excited about!

Read my introduction to the character of George Smiley here.

Tradecraft: USA Explores Historical Spies

Deadline reports that the USA Network is expanding its spy scope (which currently includes hit series Burn Notice and Covert Affairs) into the past. The cable network is developing a series based on real life Civil War spy Kate Warne.

New Spy Books Out This Week: Another With Clancy's Name On It

When Tom Clancy emerged from his years-long hibernation last Christmas with Dead or Alive, I was excited. Clancy was one of the best spy writers of the Eighties and Nineties, too long absent from the scene. When he delivered a new Jack Ryan novel six months later, Against All Enemies, I was even more excited. But neither book lived up to its potential. Both were written with co-writers (something he'd never done before for his flagship Ryan series before), but I'm hesitant to blame the co-writers. I think Clancy himself bears the brunt of the blame for the product he puts his name on. And today, there's another new book out out with Tom Clancy's name on the cover in great big letters. It's called Locked On, and it's got Jack Ryan and all the characters you used to love who go with him: John Clark, Ding Chavez, etcetera. The little tiny name underneath Clancy's is actually that of a successful spy novelist in his own right, Mark Greaney, creator of the Gray Man series (the first book of which is being developed as a potential star vehicle for Brad Pitt). I'm in the midst of his first novel, The Gray Man, right now... and so far I'm not terribly impressed. With early reports indicating that Clancy's phoned it in again, I guess I'm just going to have to turn to the movies instead and hope that Paramount delivers the Jack Ryan I want whenever they finally get this forever-in-the-works Chris Pine reboot off the ground. But here's hoping I'm wrong, and someone can tell me that Locked On is first-rate Clancy. I'd be happy to eat my words.

Tradecraft: The Equalizer Returns

After a series of stops and starts with various directors, various studios and various stars attached (I think Russell Crowe was the last name I heard), Variety reports that the long-in-the-works, on again off again big screen version of the Eighties spy show The Equalizer is back on. This time the studio is Sony, and the star is Denzel Washington. Richard Wenk (who wrote the Jason Statham Mechanic remake and contributed to the Expendables 2 script) will write the script which, according to the trade, "revolves around a former secret agent who offers his investigative services in order to atone for his past sins..." exactly like the TV show. The 1985-89 show starred the great Edward Woodward as McCall, the former spook who lent his services to people with the odds against them and nowhere else to turn. The intertextual thing going on there was that Woodward had played a moody government assassin years earlier on Callan (which happens to be one of the best spy shows of all time). Callan had to do some terrible things that weighed heavily on his conscience, and McCall easily could have been what he became a few decades later. It's too bad that Washington doesn't bring the same ex-spy extratextual baggage that, say, Timothy Dalton would have... but then he has the clout to get a movie greenlit. And I think Washington will be good. Done right, this should do for him what Taken did for Liam Neeson. McCall is the epitome of the old guy who can kick your ass. Most of all, though, I hope the movie gets the remaining seasons of the show released on DVD. Universal put out Season One a few years ago, and then dropped the ball. Denzel Washington will next be seen playing a secret agent in Safe House.

Austin Powers Returns... On Broadway?

The New York Post reports (via MI6) that, presumably having witnessed the success of his Shrek character on stage, Mike Meyers is in negotiations to bring Austin Powers to the Great White Way. "Myers, who [co-]wrote and starred in the three wildly popular movies, now hopes to turn groovy 1960s-era secret agent Powers into an all-singing, all-dancing theatrical production," according to the paper. Meyers himself would not star, but is expected to be "highly involved in writing the show." Rumors flared up earlier this year (as they do from time to time) that Myers is also hard at work on another Powers movie, which would be unrelated to the stage version. Personally, I enjoyed the heck out of the first movie, but found the sequels to be increasingly awful and the ubiquitous public imitations (brilliantly sent up by Ricky Gervais on the original Office) endlessly annoying. What started out as a really funny character was quickly done in by the worst sort of over-exposure, and I can't see a Broadway show (or another movie, for that matter), doing anything to rectify that problem. But maybe it will spur the studios to dig into their vaults and release more Sixties spy movies on DVD! If so, then I'm all for it. (Fox issued Modesty Blaise, Fathom and the Flint films for the first time to coincide with the theatrical release of Austin Powers in Goldmember.)

DVD Review: The Four Just Men

DVD Review: The Four Just Men

The Four Just Men was one of ITC’s earliest stabs at a contemporary adventure series. As such, its primary interest for fans of the genre will be a historical one. While not all the usual suspects had a hand in the scripts and direction (Brian Clemens’ name is noticeably absent from any credits), this series (which ran from 1959-60) clearly established the regular episodic formula that would form the foundation of all of ITC’s Sixties output. As I’ve written many times before, the company’s usual setup is following a man with a slightly unusual job (antiques dealer, import/export agent, photojournalist, playboy, etc.), and then ignoring whatever that job is and instead thrusting him into spy plots week after week in exotic locations via stock footage and studio backlots. This being before the advent of Bondmania sparked by Dr. No and, perhaps even more relevantly, before the British TV spy craze launched by Danger Man and The Avengers well before Sean Connery ever gulped down his first on-screen vodka martini, more of the plots are standard-issue mysteries (reflecting the private eye genre prevalent in the previous decade)–but a surprising percentage of them are still espionage-related.  It was the Cold War, after all. If you were telling adventure stories, you simply couldn’t escape such plots. 

Anyway, the slight twist on the regular formula with The Four Just Men is that instead of following a single hero, we follow four of them–individually. After a pilot that serves as an origin story and shows our four heroes all meeting in WWII–and later being reunited in tragic circumstances and signing a pact to uphold justice in their own ways–the leads rotate, and only one of them carries each story. Contrary to what I’d read about this series prior to its DVD release, however, that’s not to say that they never interact. At least one other Just Man (generally the one from the week prior or the one who will take center stage the following week) pops up in every episode–usually only via telephone, though.  Several episodes feature all four Just Men contributing from their respective home bases in London, Paris, New York and Rome.  This practice certainly adds to the series’ continuity and makes it feel more whole, and not just like an anthology show. 

The leads themselves belie a bygone era in television, when programs were targeted at adults, and not kids. In other words, they’re all old, each one whiter and more Establishment than the one before. There was no room in ITC’s 1959 stable for Jason King’s bouffant or Brett Sinclair’s shaggy do and hip, trendy (maybe?) duds. The four leads are all past-it movie stars–some more past it than others. There’s British war film stalwart Jack Hawkins as Ben Manfred, a member of Parliament based (quite naturally) in London. There’s Italian arthouse darling Vittorio de Sica(!!!) as partisan resistance fighter-turned-hotelier Ricco Poccari, who operates out of Rome.  Then there are the two Americans, ubiquitous film noir face Richard Conte as New York-based lawyer Jeff Ryder, and veteran Hollywood actor Dan Dailey (who has the sort of lumpy, hard-drinking face that could only become famous on black and white Forties film stock) as Tim Collier, a hotshot journalist who works out of Paris. Each one has a regular assistant, but the only interesting ones are Andrew Kier as Jock, Manfred’s Scottish manservant, and–particularly!–Honor Blackman as Nicole, Tim’s lovely French secretary. (Conte and de Sica are assigned more standard-issue central casting beauties who leave no impression.) Blackman, looking amazingly young, makes the most of her limited role. She is a secretary and a Girl Friday and a love interest for Tim (although I honestly can’t imagine what she sees in him), but she’s got a quick wit and she imbues the character with an independent spark that prefigures her defining role as Cathy Gale on The Avengers. Don’t get me wrong; Nicole is no Cathy Gale (and never gets to use judo), but she is more than just a pretty face–thanks as much to what the actress brings as what’s on the page.

The men’s careers–and moreso their locations–define the sorts of adventures they have to a certain degree, but of course in ITC Land anyone can happen upon kidnappers or spies or blackmailers at any time. I found Manfred’s episodes to generally have the most interesting plots–and the most espionage-heavy. Tim also gets some good ones as a reporter and as an American in Paris. Poccari’s are a mixed bag; they’re either very cool (like taking on Charles Grey as an Arab slaver or solving one of those classic “someone overpaid for a bad painting because it contained hidden secrets” cases) or very lame (usually involving orphans or urchins or some variation thereupon). In either case, he definitely brings something slightly different to the table, being noticeably older than the others. He rarely relies on fisticuffs (although he does rather brutally poke a henchman’s eye out with his cane!) or gunplay, instead using his charm and keen intellect to unravel his monthly thirty-minute mysteries. Richard Conte is not a bad performer (in fact, he makes a more appealing lead than Dan Dailey), but his character gets all the most boring cases. Perhaps it’s just because I live in America that I find the American setting (mainly New York, but he also frequently travels to Small Town USA) fairly boring compared to Rome or London or Paris, but I don’t think so. His legal profession also tends to lead to these boring cases, shoehorning his stories into a genre I could care less about. They play out like the worst of Fifties American television; of the Conte episodes I watched, I can’t recommend a single one. (Jeff gets involved in things like defending the pretty outsider accused of poisoning from the close-knit-community-turned-angry-mob-riled-up-by-respected-community-leader physically as well as in court, and prison riots, and New York race wars right out of West Side Story. Boooring.)

The most problematic aspect of the premise of The Four Just Men is determining which causes, exactly, are “just.” In the pilot (ostensibly based on an Edgar Wallace book which had already spawned two feature films), the men’s Justice-obsessed wartime commanding officer kicks the bucket and the executor of his estate summons the four men to his castle, where he reads a will bequeathing them a vast fund to spend towards forwarding the cause of Justice. He also leaves it up to them to determine what constitutes “Justice.” The Four Just Men are famous world-wide, and generally respected. Local police wherever they go have no problems with turning over their cases to famous vigilantes and look on in awe when the Just Men–who report to no one but each other–flout the word of the law in the name of the more intangible concept of Justice. And, honestly, their idea of Justice is not really anyone’s but old, white, rich dudes of the 1950s. For example, Manfred readily agrees to hush up a dying Peer’s involvement in art theft (is that really Justice?), but just as readily runs down a “rough-looking” (read: lower class) sod who seems out of place at a snooty art auction. (This not being boundary-pushing television, the rough-looking sod turns out to actually be involved, and not just a red herring.) Tim is always ready to help a beautiful, wealthy blackmail victim, even if she’s being blackmailed for something utterly reprehensible like her part in a deadly hit-and-run accident. And, in the most egregious example of questionable Justice, Tim decides to aid a philandering politician not only in extricating himself from a blackmail plot, but also in covering up his affair! 

That episode is “Les Beatniques,” and it typifies not only the show’s loose ideas of Justice at their worst, but also its complete lack of understanding its potential young audience. A senator, played by future Felix Leiter Cec Linder, wrote love letters to a fading actress that a trio of leather-clad, Abe Lincoln beard-wearing, French beatniks (or “beatniques”) have stolen for blackmail.

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” exclaims the actress.

“Not unless I can find the Martians before six o’clock,” says Tim, his face grave.

“Martians?” queries the senator.

“Well that’s what we’re up against,” lectures Tim. “A whole generation of weird kids that might as well come from Mars or any other planet for all you’ll understand about them.” He manages to look really weird himself–not to mention old and out of it–as he delivers those lines.  Comparing this encounter with the Mission:Impossible episode less than a decade later in which series star Leonard Nimoy pretends to be one of those weird kids is demonstrative of the change that the television industry would undergo in the Sixties. By the end of the decade, the networks in both Britain and America would realize that their most profitable audience was the younger generation—the “martians.”

Tim wouldn’t be able to pass himself off as a beatnik (not that Nimoy pulled it off, but at least he tried), though he does earn the compliment from a beatnick girl that he doesn’t dance too badly for a square! At the end of the episode (lesson time), he puts on his thick, professorial glasses and reads some of the beats’ poetry, quickly dismissing it as “suicide notes” and accusing them of writing off the world in their words.

One beat defends his position, arguing, “There are no answers.”

“Well how would you know?” asks Tim sanguinely. “You’ve never bothered to ask any questions.” Oh, snap! Apparently in his effort to quell the percolating youth rebellion, Tim just inadvertently started the whole question-asking beatnik movement! He’s much less appealing when Honor Blackman’s not at his side to mitigate his unrelenting curmudgeonliness.

Of course, Justice isn’t always so grey; sometimes it’s black and white and clear-cut. But even then it can be hard to suss out the truth. Manfred is forced to ask some tough questions in “The Survivor,” in which future Blofeld Donald Pleasence is either a concentration camp survivor with a list of Nazis in hiding, or else he’s a neo-Nazi agent with a list meant to discredit innocent people and former resistance fighters. It’s up to Manfred to determine which in a pretty compelling tale of terrorism and genocide that goes to pretty Callan-y dark places for a Fifties show.

Another future Blofeld, Charles Grey, shows up twice on this series, most memorably as an Arab sheik running the North African slave trade from Rome in “The Slaver.” That’s a pretty brutal episode, with unrepentantly nasty villains—and not in a Blofeld way, but in a gritty, ugly way. Right off the bat, a slaver shoots three black kidnap victims and dumps them in the water, pondering, “I wonder if the sharks like black meat?” As the chief slaver, Grey even smacks around his pretty girlfriend. The slavers in question are unscrupulous travel agents who book passage to the Holy City on pilgrimages, then instead kidnap their passengers and sell them as cargo.

“Doesn’t anybody care?” demands an incredulous (white) policeman

“They’re primitive people. Their families just write them off.” explains Poccari with a dismissive wave of his hand, regrettably recalling (to modern viewers) General Westmorland’s infamous Hearts and Minds claim that “the Oriental” doesn’t value life the same way Westerners do. It’s a good thing the old white Just Men care, since the black victims’ “primitive” families don’t! At least Just Man Poccari is well-meaning, even if he’s racist, too, in his own way. He deals these brutal villains a taste of their own medicine; this is the episode in which he pokes a henchman in the eye with his cane through an arras. It looks quite painful!

Poccari seems to specialize in the most clichéd plots, but I guess it bears remembering that they weren’t quite so clichéd back then. So maybe the glass-half-full way to view them is that he starred in more templates for future ITC episodes than anyone else! “The Crying Jester” is the one where Poccari buys a terrible painting he was never meant to buy and finds himself chased by various parties willing to kill for it. Since it can’t be its artistic merit, obviously it’s the secrets it conceals that attract the would-be buyers. It’s trite, sure, but it’s also one of the series’ more entertaining episodes! “Night of the Precious Stones” is the one where a rich dowager has her jewels stolen at a swanky function at one of Poccari’s hotels and the gang is all rounded up, except for their mastermind. It couldn’t possibly be a woman, could it? And certainly not a woman with whom Poccari is well acquainted? I'll never say…

Manfred has his share of pre-cliché classics as well, but his still tend to be my favorite episodes, for the most part. In “The Deserter,” Manfred finds himself defending a soldier accused of desertion despite the fact that the man has confessed. Only Manfred is convinced of his innocence. Who is he protecting? And why is he so confident in the face of a firing squad? The answer is a pretty good twist, but the real reason this one’s notable is for its guest cast. The young soldier accused of desertion is none other than Richard Johnson, who was not only a candidate for the role of James Bond, but later proved himself to be among the best of the Bond imitators playing a Sixties version of Bulldog Drummond in my favorite Eurospy movie, Deadlier Thanthe Male, and its sequel, Some Girls Do. TV's Sherlock Holmes, Ronald Howard, also appears. Manfred gets the art forgery case, too, in “National Treasure,” and it’s a pretty good one, even if he does display his skewed sense of elitist justice.

For a modern-day muckraker who stumbled upon it, the fact that the wife of the American Ambassador was involved in a horrible hit-and-run and then covered it up would be a major news story. Not for Tim Collier. She’s part of the Establishment, and therefore deserves his protection. He’ll reserve his Justice instead for the person who dares to blackmail her about her culpability in “The Man in the Road.” When he’s not protecting guilty politicos and their consorts, though, Tim gets the fun stuff like chasing a radioactive capsule around rural France in “The Deadly Capsule” and preventing political assassinations. In one of his better episodes, “The Prime Minister,” Honor Blackman gets to take on a meatier role, ably assisting Tim by doing spy duties (like staking out a posh hotel lobby and then taking initiative on her own and following a suspect) as he sets out to stop one such assassination.

“Village of Shame” is both “the one with the whole village full of people with a secret colluding against the one Just Man interloping in their midst (Manfred) and “the one about a wartime collaborator who betrayed his resistance comrades and eluded justice for decades following.” The former is a good enough ITC plot (and possibly even original at this particular vintage) that it makes up for the hackneyed latter, which is especially overused in this series.

The “wartime traitor” trope gets trotted out yet again in “The Rietti Group.” This time it’s Poccari, who attends a reunion dinner of his old partisan compatriots (including Geoffrey Keen) and of course ends up exposing one of them as the traitor who cost them the life of a beloved comrade decades prior. Then the group gets to sentence him to death without the involvement of any courts or anything, because that’s the kind of bonds old resistance fighters share. Yes, ITC, we get it. There were lots of heroes in the war and they still can’t get over the fact that there were also some traitors, even twenty-some years later. We get it! Unbelievably, this plotline would still rear its boring head every couple of weeks on ITC shows throughout the Sixties, proving that England just couldn’t let go of WWII, her greatest glory, as the Empire faded in the postwar world.

While it’s got some fun episodes (as well as some cringe-inducing ones), The Four Just Men is overall most interesting to modern ITC aficionados as a historical artifact.  Along with Interpol Calling, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the brief “missing link” era that bridged the gap from Fifties detective procedurals to swinging Sixties spy shows. The heroes are still the stuffy old men of the previous generation, but some of their adventures encompass the globetrotting plotlines that would fuel the Jet Age. ITC would still get a lot of mileage out of some of these plots in future iterations on The Saint, Man in a Suitcase and other shows. The Four Just Men may not be as exciting or even as politically correct (and that’s saying something) as the shows it inspired, but it sets the template, nonetheless. Casual spy fans can easily go on living their lives without ever seeing an episode of The Four Just Men and sleep perfectly soundly. But armchair scholars and television archaeologists who want to trace the origins of their favorite Sixties ITC adventure shows (as well as rabid Honor Blackman fans!) will enjoy seeing their nascent forms in this series. And for that reason, I’m highly grateful to Network for unearthing it.

If you are interested in this show, act fast! Network’s Region2 PAL online exclusive goes on moratorium at the end of the month (Friday, December 30, 2011). After that, you’ll be at the mercy of Ebay vendors.

Read my reviews of some other ITC shows:
Danger Man (aka Secret Agent)
Man in a Suitcase
The Baron
Sentimental Agent

Eurospy Title Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Rescheduled For This Month

A few months ago we heard that Wild East (primarily a Spaghetti Western distributor) had another Eurospy movie on the schedule: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a very silly spoof that turns up as the second half of a Giuliano Gemma double feature with the Spaghetti Western Alive or Preferably Dead. The set is called Spies, Fast Guns, and the Spaghetti West. Gemma is better known for his Spaghetti Westerns than this rare foray into Eurospydom. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a particularly daffy Italian spy spoof. Your enjoyment of it will depend on your tolerance for that uniquely Italian brand of silliness, but it's very Sixties and definitely lots of fun to look at throughout, at least, so genre aficionados will likely find something to enjoy. Of course so few Eurospy movies get official releases that most fans (like me) will jump at anything. Especially when it promises a 16x9 anamorphic widescreen transfer! According to Wild East, this will be the first ever English language release of this title. (Officially, anyway.) Spies, Fast Guns and the Spaghetti West, which also features the films' theatrical trailers, was originally slated for a November 8 release. It didn't make that one and was biefly slotted for December 6, but is now listed for a December 20 street date—just in time for Christmas! A glitch on the Wild East website made the title originally appear to be sold out before it was even available, but that was not actually the case. Wild East's editions are strictly limited and they do go out of print, so you shouldn't hold off on buying if you're interested... but as of now it is definitely still available! Also, the price has dropped since the original announcement. It was first listed for $19.95, but now you can grab this bargain for just $16.28 by pre-ordering through the Wild East website!