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Though British intelligence officer-turned-author John Le Carre's 1974 espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was released as a full-blown Hollywood production just last year, a much more in depth, and according to many, all-in-all outright superior treatment was given to the "Cambridge Five"-inspired narrative some thirty-odd years previous. I am of course referring to the 1979 television mini-series, which allowed for not only a far longer running time, but a very un-Hollywood handling of the screenplay as well.
Make no mistake, as you might expect from a tale written by a man who actually worked in intelligence and counterintelligence, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is as far removed as can be from the wild scrapes of James Bond and his imitators.
In place of mad car chases and torrid seductions, it has Alec Guinness staring at people, and slowly, thread-by-thread, dissecting their deceptions. In place of wild shoot-out after wild shoot-out, it has a single depiction of one lone operative, exposed behind the lines, wounded, captured, and rendered completely at the enemy's mercy. And in place of a nemesis with a funny accent and a command staff made up of killer dwarves/albinos/Siamese twins, it has the enigmatic and implacable man known only as "Karla", who appears but briefly in flashback, speaks not a single word, and gives away nothing (except, perhaps, that Patrick Stewart has never not been bald.) Indeed, George Smiley doesn't even suspect it was "Karla" that he met until long after it's too late.
And while Smiley faces off against "Karla" distantly and indirectly through his struggle against the master intelligence officer's murky and deeply calculated game - the suspicion that a mole has climbed to the highest ranks of British intelligence, a more immediate and open obstacle to the investigation is dealing with the man who replaced his mentor, "Control", as the head of MI6 - one Percy Alleline; a position he gained when both "Control" and Smiley himself were forced out of the intelligence service after a catastrophically failed operation.
In fitting with British statesman Winston Churchill's famous observation of the USSR's actions as a "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma", the task the highly trained, experienced, and perceptive, yet quiet, buttoned-down, and cautiously thorough protagonist George Smiley faces is akin to playing a game of chess, blindfolded, in which undisclosed pieces amongst one's ranks are secretly under enemy control. And all while the lumbering Alleline, promoted through a combination of his predecessor's downfall and the merits of a secret source of Soviet intelligence, holds the authority of his position close, and Smiley at a distance as the outsider he's become.
While Alec Guinness performs perfectly as the lead, the production also did good service to portraying every character of significance with, well, character - Alleline included. He's a figure who's gained his position of life-and-death responsibility through circumstances that leave questions regarding both his loyalty to the United Kingdom and her allies, and, distinct from that, whether or not he really has the skills to merit it - yet also one who externally bears no lack of traits or habits that might fool an outsider to their small and deliberately obscure professional community. Tall, baritone-voiced, naturally confident, relaxed, smartly and conservatively dressed, and, as one of Smiley's former comrades observes with a snicker, always smoking a "great log of a pipe", which he lights with an easy snap of an old-fashioned match.
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