The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

And they play the soundtrack in order to sort of make that difference available to you and so you can see it.

When you take something like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, it is 100% bleak and dark, rainy and gritty and rainy.

And that tells you right from the start, there's no light in this film.

You're going to have moments where we suddenly think something might work out.

imagine.

That's a kind of odd dichotomy that we have in our minds at any one time, you know, and it's the backdrop to that.

What happens I think with the realist movies that you get in the 1960s is this change to where not so much concerned about those individual spies in fact we're on their side it's more about what the state does so you have two enemies if you're a spy and you're in the field one is the enemy of course the other side the other one is your bosses because you have no idea what they're going to do behind your back and if we go back to something like the spy who came in from the cold even though um lemus thinks he's part of the operation he has no idea what they're actually doing behind his back And he's essentially a commodity out there.

And if they lose him, they might, you know, be sad for an afternoon, but that's about it.

Yeah, and even people like Peter Van Eyck, I don't know if your listeners recognize that name, but he was in...

most famously probably The Wages of Fear, but also The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

He plays a very memorable character in The Longest Day with John Wayne, which was a huge success in the 60s.

He is, in real life, Gene Ross's, the father of the baby that she aborted.

That's right.

We're talking about 1965's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Why? Because the random year generator spun 1965.

We've been there twice before.

wives.

We're going to talk

about The Spy Who Came In From The Cold starring Richard Burton, star of Stage and Screen, and two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor.

We are also going to be doing a little setup, 1965, what was going on, because we do drink for real.

Okay, so, but yeah, so, anyway.

She's still one of Britain's most enduring and respected dramatic actresses, and some of her best works were Limelight, as we mentioned, The Haunting, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

Ooh, that sounds like a Bond

film.

But, like, he just sits through it, and he's like this steady sh- ship, you know, going through the storm-tossed sea, and sometimes there's, like, a, a papier-mâché mons- Godzilla coming out of the water, and sometimes [laughs] there's actual, like, pirates, and he just keeps on keeping on and just sails through it.

Yeah, you, you talked about that one scene there where what we would now call an MCU villain, you know, like in red light, a, a blood transfusion going on, speaking in a very, uh, you know, supervillain tone, and he's the, and he's the boss, like, of, of the good guys, right? [laughs] Who's, uh, representing the United States government, and he sa- There's this complicated mission, which I don't think I've completely understood the mission, but then there's a reveal, which is actually not an unclever reveal Although it was sort of derivative from a lot of previous spy movies, like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, where you, you find out that the mission was actually not the mission, and so on.

You, you- by, by, by 1970s, you sort of expected a spy movie that there would be a twist, that whatever mission they started on, out on wasn't actually the mission.

But s- steady- Clint Eastwood is just this steady rock or the steady ship, whatever metaphor you want to employ, that makes it interesting 'cause you wanna find out what's gonna happen to him.

Yeah

... uh, uh, th- there was no anger.

There was just bureaucrats playing against other bureaucrats, and we'd seen that before in, like, a movie we should do sometime, John le Carré's, that book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Fam- sort of famous Sco- spy movie.

Tinker Tailor or Slow Horses? Ooh, Slow Horses, incredibly good, but I would go for Tinker Tailor.

Tinker Tailor or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? Oh, definitely The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Yes.

That is the nearest of all to what really goes on.

It captures, it captures the sort of atmosphere

...

but they never manage to surpass The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I agree.