Word: burtonizing
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...Cold: 1) if you read the book, which was a better-than-most spy story, then the movie is okay, but not as good as it would have been had you not read the book; 2) if you read the book, the movie is still great because Richard Burton is so good. I read the book, and thought the movie, thanks to Burton, was great...
...know who's working for whom; sympathies are initially nonexistant because the good guys are every bit as ruthless as the bad. Control, head of British intelligence, is well done by Cyril Cusack with his tea pots and easy acceptance of Cold War expediencies. He says to Leamas (Burton): "Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can't afford to be less ruthless than our enemies'--occasionally we have to do wicked things. The West is never the aggressor, but since the war our techniques have become very much the same. You can't be less wicked than your enemy...
...from the cynicism and out of the grey rain and cold, there emerges Burton's own narrow, rather seedy humanity. He shows his distaste for Control, for London. He loves, in his homely way, Nan (Claire Bloom). He predictably shows his contempt for Mundt and Fiedler, the two Communist spies, and takes satisfaction in playing the one off against the other. He shows no regret when he beats up a grocer, and only irritation at Fiedler's fate. And finally, Leamas is forced to define his relationship to senseless, inhuman intrigues of Control and Mundt...
...days of old, when peers were bold, and life peeresses weren't invented, Britain's House of Lords decreed that when a member rose to speak he must be "uncovered"-meaning wearing neither hat nor coronet. But Baroness Burton of Coventry, 61, feels positively naked without one of her "super-trilbys" on. And besides, she trilled to the Lords' procedural committee, every time a lady doffs her hat just to do some talking, she wrecks the hairdo. With matters thus brought to a head, the committee waived the 344-year-old rule, allowed that the girls could...
...give Burton sturdy opposition, Oskar Werner, as Mundt's itchy second-in-command, makes that "clever little Jew" a prismatic study of ambition thwarted. Claire Bloom, though too prettily cast as the leftist English librarian who befriends Leamas, nonetheless plays innocence abroad with life-or-death urgency. In Spy's superblend of suspense and philosophical despair, the girl is the last to know that her lover was already a cold-war casualty when she met him. The anonymous men who live by violence, Leamas tells her savagely, "are a bunch of seedy squalid bastards, henpecked husbands, sadists, queers...