Just prior to sitting down to revisit The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I had been chatting with an online pal of mine about The Criterion Collection viewing challenge in which we're both participating this month. I explained that I had found the later evening/middle of the night hours most conducive to watching these selections. At first, I thought it was because the films chosen for inclusion in The Criterion Collection tend to be more cerebral and require more attention than the busier, daytime/evening hours often afford.

But then I realized, specifically because I had this film set to be my next viewing, that there was more to it. Most mainstream cinema tries to depict (and often summarize tidily) big ideas, or at least offer bigger than life spectacle. We're meant to be comforted by such films, which is precisely why even when they explore a dark theme, we leave feeling connected with one another in some way.

Films such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, however, do not aspire to be our matchmaker. Instead, they take a look at what goes on in the shadows. They're often films that, at the risk of both hyperbole and cliche, shine a light on things that most of us want to go to sleep at night not having thought about at all.

It's impossible to me to conceive of watching The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at a time of day or night when decent people are awake. John le Carré's Cold War spy stories project a well-earned reputation for being stripped of romanticized ideas of the world of espionage. I've read several, and while they've all been enjoyable, it is this story more or less defines "the le Carré brand".

Long before I ever exhibited the slightest interest in spy stories, I knew of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I can't even say now when it first appeared on my radar. I knew its title, and its reputation for being a literary masterpiece. I was intimidated, in truth, and resisted approaching le Carré, until 2002 when I saw the film version of The Tailor of Panama and adored it. I read le Carré's novel, and quickly set about going back to the beginning and working my way forward through his bibliography.

Though it's George Smiley who dominates le Carré's novels, it's really Alec Leamas in his one outing who defines for us what an agent does and how his work affects him. Leamas is something of a paradox; a man who has devoted his life to a cause, but has long since been disabused of belief in any causes. Leamas finds both sides of the Cold War laughable, a dog and pony show on a grand scale to placate ideologues who never had to get their hands dirty the way as Leamas and his peers - on either side of the Iron Curtain. There is a sense that Leamas has remained at his post all these years more because of habit than ego or even professionalism.

Richard Burton plays Leamas perfectly, never trying to convince us that there's someone noble and heroic under the façade as many other actors would have tried. Instead, Burton understood that what Leamas projected was not a façade at all. Though his professional line of work required deception, at no point did Leamas ever try to project that he was any other kind of man than the one he really was.

Burton is perfectly paired here with his real-life former lover Claire Bloom as the naïve but passionate Nan Perry (née Liz Gold in le Carré's novel). Bloom conveys most of Nan's character through subtle facial expressions, informing us with the furrowing of her eyebrows that she's troubled by Leamas's cynicism or a faint smile that she's encouraged about the potential for their relationship.

On and off set, Michael Sragow's 2008 essay informs us, Burton's then-wife Elizabeth Taylor jealously kept him on a short leash away from Bloom. Perhaps this accounts for the reserved chemistry between the two on-screen, in which they clearly long to have more time together but know that external forces will not permit it; Taylor looming over Burton and Bloom just as Mundt, Fiedler and even Control interfere with Leamas and Claire's budding relationship.

Surrounding the duo is a one of the finest assemblies of stage and character actors that could have been found for such a film. Oskar Werner gives us an impassioned Fiedler, contrasting with Peter van Eyck's ice cold Mundt. Both men are unmistakably ruthless, but by film's end we learn that comparatively, it is Cyril Cusack's Control who has ice in his veins. Though both Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman have given us wonderful screen portrayals of le Carré’s chief protagonist George Smiley, I find that it is Rupert Davies who most closely resembles the look of the character described to us in the first few pages of Call for the Dead.

The narrative is very faithful to le Carré’s novel (himself having contributed to the screenplay), but it's Oswald Morris's stark black and white cinematography that best captures the feel of the source material. Every other adaptation of le Carré’s works has been in color, but to imagine this particular film in anything other than black and white is heretical. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold could only have been shot in black and white.

Contributing also to the proper feel of the film is Sol Kaplan's sparse score. By the time we see the imprisoned Leamas lying on his bed after the climactic trial, we've gone so long without any musical accompaniment that the piano and strings are startling. So enthralled by then are we with the slow burn of the plot that we expect to linger in Leamas's room indefinitely. The music feels vulgar in its way, calling our attention to what will constitute the film's "action finale". Kaplan's score is fine, but the film simply doesn't need it.

I've seen both screen versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The 2010 film covers most of the ground and nails the appropriate tone, whereas the BBC series is allowed a more le Carré-ian pace. There are pros and cons to both versions, though both are terrific and rewarding in their own ways. It is difficult, if not impossible, to envision any other screen version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold accomplishing anything other than confirming that Martin Ritt nailed it in 1965.

Edit to Add
I was so caught up in the overall themes I wanted to address that I entirely forgot to mention a little "Easter egg" of sorts I missed the first time I saw the film. When Leamas is released from prison, he walks in front of a parked car. Its conspicuously prominent license plate reads "HUN 745". I have to assume that's a reference to Potsdam Conference, held in July, 1945 (i.e., 7/45) in which Germany was formally segregated. "HUN", of course, would be reference to the Hun heritage of the Germans. I found that clever.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was re-ranked on my Flickchart to #87/1569

Koyaanisqatsi, I'm told, is some kind of unique commentary on the artificial construct of society and the unnaturalness of mankind's post-industrial ways, blah, blah, blah. We open with some footage of natural landscapes before moving onto the urban environment of southern California. There, we see how orderly everything is from factory conveyor belts to traffic (lots and lots of traffic) in about an hour's worth of footage that makes one long for the opening of Joe versus the Volcano, which made the same point in a whole lot less time (and with a whole lot more Tom Hanks).

Koyaanisqatsi is the most bothersome of documentaries, presenting us with blatantly cherry-picked evidence and leading up to not a conclusion, but a recitation of the beginning thesis (i.e., "man is destructive"). For instance, in the opening footage of the natural landscape, we see natural rocky formations that present uniform designs that were clearly not the doing of man. Nor do we see any critters whatsoever, which would instantly deflate the sanctimonious lecturing of the film because, you know, flocks of birds and schools of fish all move in formations. Oh, noes! Maybe organizational movement isn't something that man invented as his own manacle.

And what of it, anyway? If Godfrey Reggio wanted to chastise us as a species for committing ourselves to making an endless array of right turns at all hours, what does he put forth as an alternative? He stays the hell away from nature, leaving us with perhaps the path to enlightenment lies in what we do with our technology. We blow up a lot of buildings and a bridge, and we go into space. But Reggio only shows us these things without any context whatsoever. Are the leveled skyscrapers to be replaced by something indicating wiser choices? Or is he merely smugly rubbing it in our faces that all we do is destroy what we've built? And even if we do...so what?

Koyaanisqatsi made its way onto Christopher Nolan's Top 10 Criterion Collection titles. Of the film, he said:

"An incredible document of how man’s greatest endeavors have unsettling consequences. Art, not propaganda, emotional, not didactic; it doesn’t tell you what to think—it tells you what to think about."

It surprises me that Nolan would call Koyaanisqatsi "emotional", for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't find it emotional at all, outside of rolling my eyes at its pretentious condemnation of the organization of society. Secondly, though, there's the fact that I have yet to see a Christopher Nolan film that I found emotional. His storytelling sensibilities lie in the cold, cerebral areas.

The clearest microcosm is the scene in Inception in which we watch Leonardo DiCaprio - one of the finest actors of his generation/our time - given little more than the prompt "Tell the audience you're feeling upset by watching your wife commit suicide". It's the hollowest performance I've yet seen from DiCaprio, and since I know his normal work is much more affecting, fault must lie with Nolan. (I have a halfhearted supposition that Nolan is a psychopath who has to get by on mimicking human emotion because he doesn't experience it for himself.)

The one aspect of Koyaanisqatsi that I found interesting is actually in its aesthetic similarity to some of Nolan's work. I envision his pre-production notes for The Dark Knight to Wally Pfister (director of photography), Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (composers), and Lee Smith (editor) consisted of Koyaaisqatsi on DVD with a sticky note that read, "Watch this." There was something about the aerial footage in this film that instantly reminded me of the shots in The Dark Knight surveying the Hong Kong cityscape. The aforementioned montage of blown-up buildings and the bridge called to mind the destruction of the hospital, as well as Bane's attack on Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises. La pièce de résistance is the first person footage of an unseen vehicle navigating a California roadway, which seemed to be the paradigm for strikingly similar footage of the Batpod.

It isn't just what happens in those scenes that evoked The Dark Knight, but the precision of how the action is staged, blocked and framed for us. Even some of the scored music feels "related", with Philip Glass's work in Koyaanisqatsi relying heavily on string instruments for sounds in both the high and low registers to heighten our attention. (I don't speak "music" so I'm afraid I can't really articulate it any more clearly than that.)

Perhaps if Godfrey Reggio had presented Koyaanisqatsi as a short film, reducing the redundant factory/traffic pattern footage (seriously, dude, we get it), I might have responded more favorably. As it is, though, I mostly just found myself wanting to ask, "So what?" If Reggio anticipated that question, he put nothing into the film to indicate he, in turn, cared.

Lastly, using a Hopi word for the title and a few captioned remarks warning us against the destructive power of man doesn't make the film "enlightened". It's nothing more than a feeble effort to tap into the myth of "the noble savage".

Koyaanisqatsi entered my Flickchart at #1324/1570