Word: mundt
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...many Senators saw the justice of Prouty's proposal. Watched by lobbyists from the National Council of Senior Citizens in the gallery, they passed the amendment, 45 to 40, with the support of such normally conservative Republicans as Nebraska's Carl Curtis, South Dakota's Karl Mundt, and Texas' John Tower-all of whom face re-election campaigns this fall. Next day the Senate approved, 46 to 42, an amendment by Indiana Democrat Vance Hartke, barring the Administration's proposal to hike the tax on local telephone service from...
...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...
Martin Ritt, who both produced and directed, deserves credit for his cast. Oskar Werner as Fiedler and Peter Van Eyck as Mundt are good in the court room scene, though in general Werner is rather over-done and Van Eyck wooden. Claire Bloom elicits just the right amount of love from Burton. And Burton, when he sits waiting to be interviewed for a job, when he makes contact with the Communist agent, and when he looks down from the Berlin wall at Smiley, is superb. All he has to do is whisper, "I have to go early in the morning...
...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...
...paunchy, burnt out. His shoulders sag, he interrupts himself with breathy exhalations, and his eyes are dead because he is bored with killing but beyond caring. "It's like metal fatigue," says Control (Cyril Cusack), recalling Leamas from West Berlin to London for an extraordinary mission: to frame Mundt, the Communist intelligence chief whose assassins have been eradicating Britain's East German informants. Leamas must act as a decoy, shamming to convince the East Germans that he is embittered and ripe to defect. While the gears of intrigue mesh, Burton's face projects more nakedly than...