The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Oh.

It's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

That Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Exactly.

It was very good, that bit.

So you're playing the...

So there's the spy who came in from the cold.

Yeah.

Next in the 11 Film Club is John Le Carre, who essentially gave the spy film a conscience.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Constant Gardener.

He's the anti-Bond.

Precisely.

So obviously, inevitably, you eventually start to be able to move back to the kind of swinging 60s spy boom.

So you've got all these books, whether it is The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or The Berlin Memorandum, which got filmed as The Quiller Memorandum, The Bond movies, and so many others all start to appear, and even the Dean Martin, Matt Helm films, which... have very little to do with the Donald Hamilton books that they're supposedly based on, but which I think as a kid I probably rather enjoyed.

Now, Our Man Flint was huge.

I thought that was amazing, and I loved the music, and I remember at the time when I saw it in the late 1970s, and recording it off the telly with my little tape recorder so I could listen to the theme music over and over and over again, which I did do for quite a while.

And this is something that you also see in the Carré.

And obviously, it's a theme in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for example.

The plight of the Jews actually comes up quite a lot in the Carré.

And Le Carre was also famously a left-wing author.

He did the Little Drummer Boy, I think, back in the 60s or 70s.

And he did The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

He's credited with originating a lot of that

genre.

Scaling way up.

What happens when the systems built to protect you are the very things discarding you? This brings us to Dashiell Hammett as the Maltese Falcon from 1930 and John Le Carrier as the spy who came in from the cold from 1963.

This is the literature of systemic rot.

Hammett brought something entirely revolutionary to detective fiction.

Right.

It forces the reader to pay close attention to behavior.

Now, if Sam's fate operates in a corrupt city, Alec Lemus, the protagonist of John le Carre serves the spy who came in from the cold, operates in a globally corrupt system where even his own side is the enemy.

Yes.