They Spy

Either public opinion or the movie moguls' under-standing of it has realy flipped out. By all logic, the spy genre should have dwindled out of existence months ago. Instead it has grown into a ghastly fungus that won't tolerate competition. Westerns are fewer and cheaper than ever before. Mysteries without international accents seem no longer to have a place in the Hollywood scheme of things. Raw tales of adventure--well, when did you last see a raw tale of adventure?

I leave it to the soc rel types among us to explain this phenomenon. But in some ways genre no longer matters much. Thunderball and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold fall at opposite ends of the spectrum even if they do both belong to the same loose category of "spy movies."

At the same time, there is a trend away from James Bond--in its original conception, anyway. Casino Royale, the multi-Bond self-parody, should help put an end to this whole clumsy, device-laden, technically incompetent school of films. And it should be an end that pleases just about everyone (except possibly Bosley Crowther in whom some second-rate streak of romanticism was apparently aroused by the Bond movies).

Already, in place of Ian Fleming, we have John le Carre, and outgrowths thereof. The drab, coarse, hand-to-mouth existence led by unshaven forty-pounds-a-month British counter-intelligence persons appears to have awakened yet another romantic streak in the masses. The first of the new breed was Martin Ritt's deliberately ugly adaptation of Spy Who Came in from the Cold; there followed The Ipcress File (which might be termed a transitional product), and now The Deadly A flair, The Quiller Memorandum, and Funeral in Berlin.

To a certain extent, the change in styles produced an improvement in quality. Better directors and writers were drawn to spy movies once they stopped being farcical exursions into the world of Ian Fleming. Michael Anderson directed and Harold Pinter wrote The Quiller Memorandum, easily the best of the lot. But more recently the Bond hacks have begun to get their hands in to the new field. Guy Hamilton, a hack if ever there was one, has directed Funeral in Berlin, a clumsy, convoluted, illegitimate offspring of The Ipcress File in which agent Harry Palmer, again played by Michael Caine, proves a powerful bore. The direction is admittedly undistinguished, but the script to Funeral really takes the cake: the spy sets out to get an East German big-wig out of East Berlin; naturally the unsuspecting audience assumes this is what the picture is about, but around the middle, part one gets neatly resolved and the plot begins anew, now dealing with the absurdly complex and not-worth-figuring-out intertwinings of Israeli intelligence people and God knows how many ex-Nazis.

Beneath the roughage, Funeral has nice touches, not one of them remotely technical. Palmer is one spy who uses public transportation. When his superior orders him to elimi ate an untrustworthy comrade, he replies incredulously, "I'm not going to kill anyone in cold blood." In other words, he may be a spy but he's a man, too.

This kind of realism can be carried to riduculous extremes, as a freak exponent of the genre--The Spy with a Cold Nose--attempts to prove. Here the spy, played by Lionel Jeffries, has a nagging wife, a nitwit sidekick, a deaf secretary in her second childhood, and an office not unlike one of your local Chinese laundries. But though the wit lasts about forty-five minutes, the film's running time is considerably longer.

Spy comedies are really nothing new. This one resembles, more than anything else, The Pink Panther, in which Peter Sellers created essentially the same character played by Jeffries. What with the widespread encroachment of the whole spy genre on other types of films, it is to be expected that a whole new breed of spy-hyphenates will soon arise: comedies, love stories, even westerns somehow managing to introduce an element of international intrigue.

None of these will be new, either (though it's true there aren't many spy-westerns hanging around). Every thing has been done before, and in nine out of ten cases by Alfred Hitchcock. But if the writers and directors of spy movies feel free to borrow from The Lady Vanishes, Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and on down the line, they have almost universally suffered by the comparison thus brought upon themselves.

Only Quiller Memorandum demonstrates a degree of technical imagination. The color--particularly a single purple-tinted shot of Berlin at night--and the editing manage to convey the ugliness of the spy business without being ugly themselves. Yet the generally decent quality of one spy movie cannot, amidst all the tripe, justify a whole mess of them.

-JAMES M. LARDNER