GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Martin Ritt director, 1965

 

"Please have the correct toll."

 

HOOK: The price of remaining naive.

 

LINE:  “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

 

SINKER: The director, Martin Ritt’s parting shot to his combative star, Richard Burton: “I’ve had the last good lay in an old whore!” 

 

JOHN: This film asks us what it would be like to live without sympathy. Good question then, even better one today. Richard Burton looks like an early Russell Crowe in probably the best movie performance of his career. The black and white is like a knife blade that casts, oh those so grey John le Clarré shadows. I love the tension of eye contact between characters, and the way the handkerchief hung on barbed wire to signify where the couple should cross the wall, glows like a ghost as the camera pulls back after they’re shot. The cold war, if nothing else, was an unprecedented showcase for existential movies (and books). If you forgot, it will all come back with the opening sequence. What a film. What a piece of history.

 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOS out of four)

 

SPANKY: Don’t miss the no-holds-barred interview with le Clarré (né David Connwell) on the Critereon Collection DVD. We get an inside view not only of the battle of the director and Burton (both seemed to feel Burton had pissed away his career) but also the dynamics between Germans and Jews on the set that becomes a subtext for the film. Also we discover that Burton, then recently married to Elizabeth Taylor who visited the shooting, had once had an affair with the film’s leading lady Claire Bloom. Talk about cold war.

 

“TWO PAWS UP” (4 BARKs out of four)