The British spy novelist, John le Carré, recently died in mid-December 2020. Now, before we get to Mr. Le Carré, I want to spend a few minutes on the man he was before—known as David Cornwell. He was born into what would have seemed like a modestly prosperous and middle-class English family in the lovely resort town of Poole, located on the southeastern coast of England.
But things aren’t always as they seem. David’s mother, Olive, abandoned the family when David was just five years old. He didn’t see her again until he was 21 years old. His father, Ronnie, was hardly the type to win any Father of the Year awards. He got himself involved with the Kray Twins, the notorious, violent, murderous London gangsters who ran nightclubs. The Krays, by the way, were the subject of the excellent British gangster movie Legend (2015). The bottom line with those two: don’t get involved.
Ronnie Cornwell failed to heed that advice and ended up convicted of insurance fraud.
With his mother gone and his father in prison, Cornwell was sent to boarding school. In those days, English boarding schools were noted for their cruel and abusive ways, and Cornwell hated his schools. He dropped out and wandered, eventually ending up in Bern, Switzerland, where he attended the university and studied modern languages. In 1950, when Cornwell was 21 years old, he joined the intelligence corps of the British Army and worked as a German language interrogator of people crossing the Iron Curtain to come to Western Europe.
In 1952, Cornwell continued his studies of modern languages at Oxford. Oh, and, of course, worked as a spy for MI5, one of the two main British intelligence agencies. (MI5 does domestic spying, while MI6 does foreign espionage.) Cornwell spied on leftist groups at Oxford, searching for Soviet agents. Oxford and Cambridge were notorious homes for Soviet double agents from the 1930s into the 1960s, so, presumably, Cornwell had plenty to spy on during his years at Oxford.
Cornwell joined MI5 full-time in 1958 and then MI6 in 1960, working as a spy out of the British embassy in Bonn, Germany, the capital of West Germany. He had a natural inclination to write, so he cranked out a couple of murder mystery novels using the pen name John le Carré (French for John The Square. Hah!). In 1963, his first spy novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, became an enormous global bestseller, so David Cornwell decided to switch from being a spy to doing two new things: becoming John le Carré full-time, and writing spy novels.
Unlike most spy novels (I’m thinking of you here, Ian Fleming, and your character James Bond), le Carré’s stories have a high literary quality. The situations are always complex, the spy work itself is often dull and grinding—yet punctuated by moments of terror—and they are all morally ambiguous. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t read Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, or Ken Follett. Why not? They write fun and fast-paced books that are perfect for the beach. Le Carré’s novels are more suited for late-night reading when you’re alone and can’t seem to sleep. Or for rainy afternoons with a cup of hot coffee on the table next to you and a bottle of Irish whisky within arm’s reach.
Le Carré published more than 20 novels. They have proven to be fertile ground for filmmakers, with nine of them made into movies. No reason to stop now, Hollywood.
I think we’re all up for more movies based on John le Carré movies. Here are my favorites.
This is the film (and novel) that brought David Cornwell “in from the cold”—the term used to describe a spy ending their undercover duty and isolation. Here, Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, a spy nearing retirement who’s sent on one last mission in East Germany before coming in from the cold. This movie, like the novel, is brooding and gloomy.
Claire Bloom plays the idealistic young member of the British Communist Party whom Leamas keeps an eye on. During the mission, he draws the attention of the East German secret police, who mistakenly think he might be a good recruit. The betrayals and double-crosses pile up. This is a dark and tense film, loaded with the moral ambiguities that were prominent themes in all of le Carré’s work.
“I don’t believe in Father Christmas; I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Karl Marx. I don’t believe in anything that rocks the world,” Leamas says at one point while meeting with his potential East German handler. Burton is magnificent here, offering a truly remarkable performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination. The movie was directed by Martin Ritt, who directed several outstanding films, including Sounder (1972), Norma Rae (1979), and Stanley and Iris (1990).
The novel this film is based on was adapted for the screen twice, the first being this BBC miniseries from 1980 that starred Alec Guinness, and the second, a feature film adaptation from 2011 that starred Gary Oldman. Both were playing one of the central figures in le Carré’s novels: the spymaster George Smiley.
I found the feature film to be plodding and challenging to enjoy. I gave up on it twice—partially because I am a bit of a non-fan of Gary Oldman, admittedly. Whenever I watch him, I often think, “Yes, I get it. You’re an actor, and you’re showing us how you’re a special actor now by shouting a lot.” That may be the most inarticulate criticism of an actor I could have come up with and you may freely ignore it.
Unsurprisingly, I prefer this miniseries version. Alec Guinness is always one of my favorites, mainly because he is an incredibly precise and careful actor, but you never see the strings, so to speak. If you’re looking for a miniseries to dive into, I highly recommend this one.
By the way, I also found an interview le Carré did in 2002, where he states that this miniseries was his favorite adaptation of all his works. It’s a riveting tale of trying to figure out who the mole is in the British secret service. Even Smiley falls under suspicion, and for a bit, you find yourself thinking he might actually be the Soviet double agent.
This is undoubtedly the most Hollywood-ish of the John le Carré novels turned into movies. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just brassier, more obvious, less subtle, and still a lot of fun.
Pierce Brosnan stars as Andy Osnard, a British spy reassigned from Madrid to Panama after he gets caught having an affair with the Spanish Foreign Minister’s wife. Oxnard views what many would see as a demotion as an opportunity instead: he’ll take advantage of Panama’s international nature, along with its reputation for corruption, to make a private fortune for himself. He ropes in a tailor who works with Panamanian government officials to draw out secrets from them. Geoffrey Rush plays the tailor and Jamie Lee Curtis plays the tailor’s wife.
While le Carré was involved in writing the adaptation here, this doesn’t feel so much like a typical le Carré story. The film was directed by the highly-accomplished John Boorman, who’s been nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar for his work in Deliverance (1972) and Hope and Glory (1987). It’s an exciting, fast-paced spy thriller, and I highly recommend it.
A moving and unsettling drama, this is one of the best adaptations of a le Carré novel. Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a low-level diplomat and horticulturalist posted to Kenya. His quiet life is thrown into chaos when his wife, Tessa, (Rachel Weisz), is murdered along with her driver at a crossroads in rural Kenya. Quayle embarks on a personal investigation into Tessa’s murder, and the deeper he goes into it, the more he realizes how little he knew about her.
This is an excellent thriller, and the performances—particularly Weizs’s—are outstanding. Much of her story is told in flashbacks as Quayle journeys further into why Tessa was so insistent on them returning to Kenya. It turns out that she was looking into dirty dealings by a global pharmaceutical company. A dark, immense, and evil web of corporate intrigue and deceit begins to emerge.
Unlike most le Carré principal characters, Justin and Tessa are compassionate and lovely people, and the moral ambiguities of spying aren’t present. Tessa ended up in the maw of relentless corporate greed, and Justin, her widowed husband, is left to figure out how to go on with his life.
The film was directed by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, who co-directed the breathtakingly-great Brazilian crime drama City of God (2002). The screenplay by Jeffrey Caine received a nomination for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and Weisz was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Other than The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, this is my favorite John le Carré movie adaptation. Philip Seymour Hoffman was never better than while playing this role—Gunther Bachman, a counterespionage expert in an elite German intelligence unit. A Chechen refugee named Issa Karpov shows up illegally in Hamburg, Germany, seeking asylum after being imprisoned and tortured by Russian Army intelligence. Bachmann’s principal objective is to determine if a respected local Muslim philanthropist is funneling money to Al Qaeda, and then suddenly, the Karpov case lands on his desk. Are they somehow connected? Or can Bachmann use Karpov to ensnare the philanthropist?
The twists and turns in the plot of this film make it an intense and involving story. Hoffman’s character is frumpy and disheveled but deeply passionate about his work. I couldn’t say for certain, but Bachmann seems to be quite similar in personality to le Carré himself. In the early 1960s, le Carré was stationed in Hamburg. He wasn’t looking for Al Qaeda during those days, but rather Soviet spies. The methods and personality of Hoffman’s character bear a striking resemblance to le Carré himself, who engaged in all sorts of spying activities in Hamburg, including house break-ins, to gradually move up the ladder of a Soviet spy ring. Bachmann describes his method thusly: “We catch a minnow to catch a barracuda to catch a shark.”
The film also stars Rachel McAdams, Willem Defoe, and Robin Wright. It was directed by the Dutch director Anton Corbijn, noted for his music videos, especially the dazzling music video he did for Coldplay’s Viva la Vida that set the band and the song within Eugene Delacroix’s masterpiece painting of the French Revolution, Liberty Guides the People. The adapted screenplay is by the Australian writer Andrew Bovell, who also wrote one of my favorite dance movies ever, Strictly Ballroom (1992).
I’d like to offer a quick travel tip. If you and your spouse are on vacation in Morocco and a boisterous Russian businessman invites you to a fabulous party he is throwing for his daughter’s birthday, and then gives you a USB drive that has the names of Russians laundering money through a new bank in London, politely decline the offer. “Thanks, but no thanks” is all you have to say. You should then get in a cab and go to the airport immediately. Sure, that’s the safe thing to do, but that wouldn’t make much of a novel or a movie, now would it?
Ewan McGregor plays Perry McKendrick, the good-natured London school teacher, and Naomi Harris is his wife. They get swept up into a dangerous and violent world as soon as Perry turns the USB drive over to MI6. These are excellent performances by MacGregor, Harris, and Stellan Skarsgård (as the Russian). The film was directed by noted British documentary and television director Susanna White. The adapted screenplay was by Hossein Amini, who also wrote the incandescent film, The Wings of the Dove (1997). This is a chilling and fast-paced spy thriller, and the peril is more apparent and vivid than in most of le Carré’s stories.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.