The Deadly Affair (1967)

The Deadly Affair is a 1967 British spy thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, although given that it’s based on a John le Carré novel (his first novel, Call for the Dead) thriller might be the wrong word. Let’s just call it a spy film.

Paramount’s 1965 adaptation of le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been much praised, and rightly so. Both movies tried to capture the distinctive le Carré atmosphere of failure and sordidness. John le Carré removed every trace of glamour from the spy fiction genre.

Call for the Dead was the novel that introduced le Carré’s most famous character, British spymaster George Smiley. Columbia had bought the rights to Call for the Dead but they did not have the rights to the George Smiley name so in this movie the character is renamed Charles Dobbs.

Dobbs/Smiley (who presumably works for MI5) has been given a very routine assignment. A senior Foreign Office functionary, Samuel Fennan, has been anonymously accused of having being a communist at Oxford in the 30s. Fennan points out that everybody at Oxford was a communist at that time and that half the current British Cabinet are ex-communists. Dobbs and Fennan have a laugh about this, it’s all very friendly, Dobbs assures Fennan that his security clearance is in no danger and that he has no need to worry. Fennan seems very cheerful. He then goes home and shoots himself.

Dobbs is mystified. He had given Fennan a clean bill of health. Why on earth would the fellow shoot himself? Now Dobbs has to speak with Fennan’s widow Elsa.

It’s the phone call that worries him. The early morning reminder call. The timing is odd, and why did Elsa Fennen lie about it?

Helping him out on the case is Inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews), the MI5 liaison officer with the local police.

And there’s something else worrying Dobbs. He’s being tailed. When someone tries to kill him he gets really interested.

The novel is a very good story but it’s not exactly cinematic and it’s rather talky. Attempts have been made to address that issue in the movie and to add a bit more excitement, with at least some success although it’s still very talky.

No-one will ever equal Alec Guinness’s performances as Smiley in the two BBC TV mini-series from 1979 and 1982 but I have to say that James Mason runs him a close second. Mason gets across Smiley’s ineptness in his personal life and his fussiness. Mason’s version has perhaps just a bit more edge. What makes the George Smiley of the novels so interesting is that he is a brilliant intelligence agent but outside of his professional life as a spy he is a total zero, a ludicrous failure, a man with no self-respect whatsoever. He’s not even a tragic failure. He wallows in his own humiliation and degradation. Presumably that’s how le Carré saw spies. Having been a spy himself he was presumably aware of their crippling psychological incompleteness.

Harry Andrews is excellent, as always. Roy Kinnear is very good as a sleazy pretty crook.

The women are more of a problem. Both the novel (not so much this novel but the George Smiley novels as a whole) and the movie put a lot of emphasis on Dobbs/Smiley’s sad pathetic personal life. Since their marriage his wife Ann has had more affairs than he’s had hot dinners. She sleeps with his friends and colleagues and in fact with any man who asks her. She is a thoroughly unpleasant woman, not because she’s promiscuous but because she enjoys humiliating her husband. He seems to enjoy being humiliated. You could call it a relationship based on emotional sadomasochism.

Dobbs/Smiley’s personal life is important since it emphasises the unhealthiness of the world of espionage. No-one who is psychologically or emotional healthy would become a spy. Harriet Andersson makes Ann Dobbs a very very unsympathetic character, which is the right way to play her. Unfortunately her performance is stilted and artificial and totally unconvincing.

Simone Signoret is all self-pity as Elsa Fennan. The one actress who really shines is Lynn Redgrave as Virgin Bumpus (yes, that’s her name). Virgin works in a theatre and may be able to give Dobbs some information. Lynn Redgrave is charming, ditzy and crazy but she does add a lighter touch which doesn’t hurt in an otherwise very serious and grim movie.

The major plot twist is something you should be able to see coming a mile away, which is a definite weakness in the storytelling.

It’s interesting that while le Carré depicted espionage as unglamorous and often nasty and was aware of the moral dubiousness of the spy world he was also a dedicated Cold Warrior. For le Carré the communists were most definitely the bad guys. And as pathetic and contemptible as Smiley might have been he was one of the good guys. You don’t get quite the same level of moral equivalence that you get in the Callan TV series which was also made in 1967.

This is a movie that was clearly intended to look drab and depressing and claustrophobic. It would have worked much much better in black-and-white but sadly by 1967 that was no longer a commercially viable option. Lumet wanted to shoot in black-and-white, was overruled by Columbia and asked cinematographer Freddie Young to come up with a way of shooting in colour but with much of the colour drained out. Which Young did, very successfully.

The Deadly Affair got very good reviews and did very poorly at the box office. It’s easy to see why. The film has very real virtues. The drab depressing visual style is totally appropriate for le Carré’s world. The downbeat mood and the atmosphere of despair and defeat are also appropriate. There’s also the emphasis on moral complexities rather than action. These are all things that critics would love and audiences would hate. And it has none of the elements audiences would crave. There’s not a single full-blooded action set-piece.

Most of all there’s no memorable leading lady. Harriet Andersson was a darling of the art-house crowd but totally unknown outside Sweden. She’s not glamorous, she’s not sexy (she’s the most unsexy nymphomaniac in history), she’s not charismatic. She was uncomfortable acting in English. Her performance is confused and unconvincing. Call me crazy if you like but I can’t help thinking that the right actress to play Ann would have been Joan Collins. If you watch Joan Collins in Warning Shot, made a year earlier, I think you’ll see what I mean. And The Deadly Affair desperately needed some glamour and some erotic heat to balance the downbeat stuff if it was going to draw in audiences.

I think The Deadly Affair is pretty good and I recommend it but it was always going to be box-office poison.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray looks pretty good.

I reviewed John le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead not too long ago (and I was very impressed by it).