Into the cold

the 1960s was the spy movie.

The first Bond film released was in a way an accident, successful or not for the reasons that the makers intended. They made it for real and the audiences laughed at its absurdity.

There followed then progressively bigger extravaganzas of consumer vandalism.

Bodies littered the screen, but the real focus of attention was on the gadgets, gleaming and ingenious.

Bond reduced everything and everyone to expendable objects; men were merely part brutal mechanism, women relegated to the most crude forms of sexual exploitation.

If ever there was a barometer for paucity of imagination and sheer vulgarity of taste, Bond was it.

Conspicuous consumption substituted creative invention; sadism, sensitivity. The budgets for the later films ran into millions of dollars of mechanical waste, sufficient, it is worth noting in passing when the British film industry runs into crisis and unemployment looms up with the season's greetings, to finance at least 20 low-budget films.

For those who liked their spies more homely, Michael Caine's Harry Palmer fitted the bill. He provided glamour with humdrum, wheeling his basket through supermarkets, smoking his Gauloises, reluctantly filling in his expenses, falling foul of his superiors and putting a bullet through his adversary.

There was a certain evenSean Connery.

They were not really Cold War thrillers; the politics was always vague; sinister figures were invariably preparing to take over the world. But western values ultimately triumphed.

We could rest assured that the world of machines, opulence and glamourized violence would triumph in its own dehumanized way.

In the middle of this 'sophisticated' camp fascism, John le Carré wrote a book called 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'.

Christopher Jones in The Looking G Frank R. Pierson based on the book It was a compelling piece cr writing, the work of a craftsman, but, more than that, of a creative intelligence as well.

Technically, he handled the twists and turns of narrative with the accomplishment of Graham Greene. His paragraphs reverberated with detail in this enclosed world of espionage.

OUTRAGE

But above all was a sense of quivering outrage at waste, at brutality, at hypocrisy and double-talk.

These public school civil servants practiced murder with the calm detachment of a psychopath. They acted on whims, caprices, to further their own positions in the hierarchy; to satisfy their own fantasies.

They were all involved some costly game that held brief for, or respect human life.

They manipulated from their clubs and elegant Georgian houses or country homes. To uphold what? In the name of •They spoke of values, of Empire, of the British way of life, yet they pursued their petty and anachronistic ends with a petulant violence.

Everything and everybody was expendable.

Le Carrés books are the work of a humanist. But they smoulder with an outrage against an indifference to life. And this is their main quality and impact.

DESPAIR

rich one asumes delayed which one assumes from firstly curiositythe lid was off the murky world of espionage with an obvious authenticity — but probably more important it reflected the uncertainty of the middle class, a sense of their own manipulation, their closure by above them, unelr anxiety in a changing situation differing balance of forces. ¡lass War' by John Le Carrerected by They were reassured equally that the bureaucracies on the other side of the 'Iron Curtain' appeared not very different from the one they knew home.

They responded to the tension and despiar that only humanism could offer them.

The world was a bastard and really ought to be better.

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' reflected very much a middle-class Britain coming to terms with a loss of Empire and facing the cold of the mechanized monopolies that were increasingly cutting the ground from under their feet.

The book was made into a competent film, but no more than that.

It lacked the accumulation of detail, deep despair and anguish, and replaced it with an explicit theatricality. It hardly transcended the boundaries of melodrama or spoof.

War', a later book by le Carré, has been made into a film.

By chance it was the first flm I saw in the 1970s and what strikes one immediately is the sense that it belongs to some other era.

The familiar themes there. Two civil servants, Ralph Richardson and Paul Rogers, send a young Polish defector across bernar border to find out information about a supposedly new rocket They send him ta tastes of seceate their own World War action; back in combat, with simple war-time issues.

Their madness has all the cold efficiency oI their trade. In sending the boy to his cerlam dearn they carerully cover up their tracks.

It is all irrelevant charade, calculated anti-life, andame for personal prestige The gratification of old This is the message of the filmet there abision, a lack of energy The director has made a film that is instantly déja vu.

It is worthy. It attempts to recreate consciously not, some of thi better filmic sit. uations of the last six years.

A lorry de from Godares ning down the sea, straight lift from Truffaut s The Four Hundred Blows'; the surprised dog leaping out of a lorry, Hitchcock.

But it is not only the techniques oi the director dium piece of passé style itself give the quality of a compenune subject matter seems irrelevant because world situation has changed.

As the forces of imperialism 1n the ore bare do the tao he threaucracies of se communist countries themelves to police preter workers too.

They come closer together. France and Czechoslovakia made that clear and the further behind-the-scenes deals reveal themselves weekly It is this changed situation that eludes the film.

There is a competent anachronism about it.

In contrast, the only living thing in it is the fascinating opher Jones Comparisons are obvious; there is a striking resemblance Alain Delon and even Cybushi, Dean, young vet ones transcends a mere amalgam, or imitation He speaks and moves with the confidence and frustration of a new generation of youth.

It is his dormant energy tha is the real impact of the fil and makes it worth seeing. He has both restraint, uncertainty, irony and suspicion.

It is these qualities that he embodies revolutionary vanguard for she ageing imperialism, but future.

AS A footnote, the new Parts programme "Aquarius' cannot go without comment.

It really did spotlight the utter bankruptcy of bourgeois ideas on art and culture.

Starting shith animals, it Christmas show 'animals, continued the pantomime theme with a discussion Jean-Luc Godard's new 'British Sounds'.

Watching a set in glorious Technicolor and not having seen the film, it was rather like something out Wonderland', a sort of glass case of squawking parrots, airing their nonsenses, with all the solemnity that only fools nave.

smiling, Every hing was banaed to a sort sorteresting, in thing. rather draining or import out of their subject.

I got the feeling that they'd given up. They don't even care more about their own ally culture.

The only real thing in it wa the two carworkers who had the sense and dignity to leave the hall and the twittering reaction behind them.