DB7

Move over, James Bond: Serious, gadget-free spy films are back
By Geoffrey Macnab
Published: 02 March 2007

There are spy movies, and then there are spy movies. This year, as if to counter the derring-do of James Bond and Jason Bourne, there have been a number of films about the world of espionage and counter-intelligence from the perspective of the functionaries behind desks.

The spies in these stories aren't Martini-quaffing, gun-toting action heroes. Take Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) in The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro's new film about the birth of the CIA. Wilson is bookish and seemingly incapable of articulating emotion. His hobby is building model ships in bottles. Whether watching a suspect being tortured or trying to identify a couple making love in a secretly recorded film, he remains utterly impassive.

Equally buttoned up is Ulrich Mühe as the Stasi agent eavesdropping on an East German playwright's life in the recent German film, The Lives of Others. There is nothing remotely glamorous about the way he wires up his quarry's house and then sits in an upstairs room, spying on him.

One of Hollywood's greatest character actors, Chris Cooper, is shortly to be seen in Breach, playing the real-life FBI boss Robert Hanssen. His story isn't heroic either. In 2001, Hanssen was convicted of treason for selling US secrets to Moscow for $1.4m in cash and diamonds.

Just why are so many people making movies about the seedy and often banal underbelly of espionage? Eric Roth (the writer of The Good Shepherd and Munich) says there is something fascinating about "what the sense of secrecy does to people... I think you can make a commentary about society as a whole [by] looking at these somewhat isolated people."

Spy movies invariably hinge on betrayal of one sort or another. There is pathos in seeing once-idealistic characters full of self-hatred about the compromises they have had to make. There is also a constant fascination about who is manipulating whom, and where the truth might really lie.

Understandably, actors relish playing spies. Richard Burton gave arguably his greatest screen performance as the spy Alec Leamas in Martin Ritt's John Le Carré adaptation, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965). He was cast as a spy pretending to be drunk, embittered at his bosses and ready to defect. There was a huge, seedy pathos in his performance. The critic Kenneth Tynan noted: "Mr Burton's dour and expressively ravaged face comes to resemble a bullet-chipped wall against which many executions have taken place."

Equally moving, although very different in tone, was Alan Bates's performance as Guy Burgess in John Schlesinger's TV movie An Englishman Abroad (1983). Burgess had betrayed his country and defected to Moscow. Bates beautifully conveys his bombast, his malice, and his yearning for the world he left behind.

The Good Shepherd contains various nods to British spy stories. There is an interlude in wartime London that self-consciously evokes the world of the (Vienna-set) The Third Man. One of the characters, the plummy-voiced Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup) is based partly on the British spy Kim Philby.

It comes as little surprise that Roth professes himself an ardent admirer of Le Carré and of Graham Greene. "There's not a better moment for me in this genre than when [Le Carré's] Smiley and his arch enemy Karla pass each other on the bridge," he enthuses. "I guess I have some interest in relationships between secret organisations and governments, what it does to the soul and how these men react under these situations when they have this kind of responsibility."

The Hollywood writer (whose other credits include Forrest Gump and The Insider) had his own brush with the secret services when he was a college student and an English professor attempted to recruit him for the CIA. (This incident is echoed in The Good Shepherd, in which Wilson is sounded out as a future spy by the poetry-loving literature professor, Dr Fredericks, who is played by Michael Gambon.)

Roth declined the chance to join the CIA. However, years later, when Forrest Gump became a huge international hit and the Hollywood studios asked him what he wanted to do next, Roth suggested a film about the origins of the CIA. He is now planning two further sequels to The Good Shepherd: one to be set in the 1970s and 1980s (which will culminate with the fall of the Berlin Wall) and one looking at the activities of the agency in the run-up to September 11. He argues that, in telling the story of the CIA, he can provide what amounts to a social history of the US. "There is a real dichotomy between having a secret, clandestine organisation and having an open political process, like a democracy, having oversight. I don't know what should trump," he says, adding that those who run the CIA are "Brahmins, white, Anglo-Saxon protestants, mostly wealthy people from Ivy League schools".

The problem is that audiences tend to prefer spy movies of the Mission: Impossible variety. Despite winning critical plaudits, The Good Shepherd has only made around $60m (£30m) in the US - a modest return for a big-budget, 167-minute all-star movie.Other downbeat spy yarns have also struggled. Michael Apted's Enigma (2002), about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, failed to capture the public imagination. Cinemagoersdon't always warm to tales about desk-bound cryptographers or tormented double agents.

There is a revealing anecdote in Leo Marks's memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, chronicling his experiences as a codemarker for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. As far as Marks was concerned, he was doing work of the utmost national importance. But that wasn't how his neighbours saw it. They posted him a letter containing a white feather and the message, "shirker". To them, the idea that he could be contributing to the war effort by sitting in an office solving puzzles didn't stack up. Movie audiences, too, are sceptical about spy films in which the protagonists spend most of the time behind their desks. Then again, maybe audiences want more realistic tales. James Bond in his latest incarnation is a far harder-edged (and more plausible) figure than 007s past.

Moreover, many of these downbeat films are as much character dramas as they are spy thrillers. They work primarily because they show tormented individuals at defining moments in their lives.

Moor Larkin

Next Questions. The most improbable conspirator in the Soble ring was a roly-poly, harmless looking mystery man named Boris Morros, who used to be well known in Hollywood and Manhattan as musical director of Paramount Pictures, and later as a movie producer (Tales of Manhattan, Carnegie Hall). Over the past decade or so, Russian-born Boris Morros had little to do with moviemaking, spent much of his time in Europe. Just what he was up to was a puzzle to his old Hollywood acquaintances. Shortly after the FBI nabbed the Sobles, the Justice Department identified Morros as its star witness. There were strong hints that Morros had been serving as a U.S. secret agent while operating inside the conspiracy as a trusted courier.
Guilty -- TIME

Ernest Borgnine starred as Morros in a 1950's film, Confessions of a Counterspy, aka Man on a String.

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ChristineCB

Are the GAAP funds considered 'gadgets'?

Moggy

The Good Shepherd I did not much care for; but the Lives of Others was very good IMHO; as was Blackbook. What is astonishing is that we don't see more cloak and dagger movies like Blackbook or Lives of Others - the cerebral type, where it is a battle of wits, rather than a battle with reality. In the past we had The Man Who Never Was (on OP. MINCEMEAT) - which was pretty good. The files on SOE that are being released - well, there are so many really good stories in them that would make excellent movies. (Charlotte Grey needed to be rewritten a few more times.)