Five Classic Spy Films

To be a voyeur, to peak at a private world not your own is a fundamental part of reading a book or going to see a movie or play. As a reader or an audience member, you are, for a time, permitted to survey that which is typically hidden from you during your everyday life. The only way you can learn about actual people as much as you learn about characters in fiction is by spying on them. Perhaps this is why spies and their genre films have such a visceral pull for audiences. Add sex, lies and state secrets to the essential urge people have for observation and understanding and you have a potent mix for highly emotional drama, in which the best and worst of human nature competes for stakes that are both fantastic and accessible.

Detective stories and the Westerns dominated the early days of film, but tension surrounding two world wars gave legs to a new kind of genre film: The spy film, which began with Fritz Lang’s Spies in 1928, came into its own during the 1930s when Alfred Hitchcock began to make a number of films concerning what many call the world’s second oldest profession. The slew of combat dramas produced by the Second World War were ill-suited for the Colder, much more difficult to understand conflict that followed in its wake. The spy film became the only vehicle to explore the complex, deadly and worldwide game between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

But for all these grand notions of chronicling an era, the best spy films have always heavily relied on depicting some aspect of the emotional drudgery that accompanies the business itself. Like politics, spying is both awful and noble at the same time. It involves lying, manipulation and exploitation. It also serves the cause of truth – and fewer holier aims exist. As such, the best spy films are the ones in which an important unknown is chased by band of flawed individuals, each trying to get the best of the other.

Sounds a lot like life, doesn’t it?  

1. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

It is not often a great novel becomes a great film, but John le Carre’s classic tome is translated near-perfectly onto the screen in this 1965 film. Richard Burton plays British spy Alec Leamas, a cynical and hardened Cold Warrior who has just seen his entire network of operatives uncovered and executed by the East German Stasi. Sent home in disgrace, Leamas is quickly recruited for one last mission, one in which he is promised revenge against the German responsible for the death of his network. Leamas agrees and allows himself to be recruited by the other side in order to sow confusion there, but unknown to both him and the audience, a larger, more sinister game is being played and Leamas is nothing more than a pawn.

Who is playing who?

Shot in black-and-white, the film oozes atmosphere and functions almost as a film noir. The famous twist at the end, along with Leamas’s resigned decision to quit trying and “come in from the cold,” are unforeseen and haunting, as is Leamas’s dark assessment of his profession and its dehumanizing elements: “What do you think spies are? They are a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands ...” Not to be missed.

2. Notorious

Hitchcock probably made more spy films than any other director. His best is 1946’s Notorious, one of his less well-known efforts. It is a beautiful picture, filmed in elegant settings with glamorous people. But set amongst this splendor is a gritty tale of espionage that captures the complicated relationship between a spy (Cary Grant) and his agent (Ingrid Bergman) better than any other film. Throughout, Grant coldly takes advantage of Bergman’s alcoholism and neuroses in order to get her to spy on an old boyfriend, a man associating with Nazis in Argentina who are up to no good.

Running an agent, cooly...

When the boyfriend (Claude Rains) proposes marriage to Bergman, Grant ignores his own feelings for her and pushes her into the arrangement, knowing it will enable her to feed him better information. The strain of a double-life – faking love and using sex to gain access to secrets – is delicately and expertly portrayed by Bergman. There are several wonderful sequences in the movie and an incredible amount of tension, but it is unabashed realism of Grant and Bergman’s partnership that stands out.

3. The Third Man

Not a straightforward spy film, but spies and espionage abound in this moody expose of post-war Vienna that explores the darkest extremes of human tendencies. Joseph Cotton plays a man who is summoned to work with a friend in the city and arrives to find him dead. Exactly what this friend did for a living and how he died are both shrouded in mystery. All of the people Cotton encounters in this distorted version of Vienna are more than what they initially seem and none of them want him to look too closely at what has happened. Beautifully filmed with a haunting soundtrack an incredible cameo by Orson Welles, this tale is chock full of seediness, intrigue and double-dealing, but we remember it ultimately for what it has to say about human nature and the lies people often tell themselves to excuse the things they do. For a full review of the film, click
here.

4. From Russia with Love

James Bond films do not depict espionage well. Bond is much too extroverted and his methods far too clumsy and action-oriented for real spooks, but not having an entry from perhaps the most famous spy in the world would make for a pretty poor list. Although it is not my favorite Bond, 1963’s From Russia with Love is certainly the best, in terms of plot and actual espionage. Free from the special effects, gadgets and spectacularly absurd antagonists that came to dominate the franchise (as well as make it so easy to parody), this outing sees 007 lured into a Cold War mission to acquire a code-machine under false pretenses.

Incredibly shapely women means it's a Bond flick...

In reality, the international terrorist group SPECTRE is dangling the machine in order to bring Bond into the open so the organization’s assassin can kill him. Along the way, 007 navigates through the nest of intrigue that is post-war Istanbul and encounters a KGB-trained honey pot sent to seduce him with the charms of her considerable body. It all ends in a delicious cat-and-mouse game between Bond and his assailant, an excellent chase scene and a frightening attack from a hag with a knife hidden in her shoe. Who could ask for more, really?

5. Where Eagles Dare

Another Richard Burton outing, this one supposedly filmed so his son could enjoy a “boy’s adventure” film about the War. As far as that goes, this 1968 effort does not disappoint. The 2 ½ hour running time sprints by, thanks to a delightful cacophony of quirky dialogue intermixed heavy doses of intrigue and machine gun fire, most of which is provided by a certain Clint Eastwood. The plot centers on a mission to rescue an American General being held captive in a mountain fortress by Nazis, but this is little more than a springboard for the whirlwind that follows.

Getting ready to kill Nazis

Given the high body count and action-oriented climax, some would call this a straight war film, but I am sticking with the spy genre. Burton’s real purpose for storming the aforementioned castle is to pull off a complex counterintelligence coup, only half of which makes sense the first time it is revealed. The end of the film sets the stage for more Burton/Eastwood sequels. My heart cries that none were made, although perhaps it is for the best. What we have here is pretty damn entertaining – and as I already suggested, it is not all lowbrow stuff, either. One of my favorite films, even if I know I should not revel in its simple complexity as much as I do. This is Indiana Jones meets James Bond and it is nearly perfect.

The Ferocity of Alone

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is perhaps the most famous Western of all time.

Made in 1967, this is the third of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that star Clint Eastwood as a lonely gunslinger with a curiously unique – some would say indecipherable – code of conduct that allows him to remain aloof from the immorality of frontier America. Of the three, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is by far the most complicated and compelling of the so-called “Man With No Name Trilogy" the two men made together. Indeed, the fact the movie survives the ravages time often inflicts on Westerns and remains popular among both fans and critics alike is a testament to the film’s visual and thematic power and the very real weight of the philosophical issues the plot wrestles with.

 

More specifically, this is a film that probes the limits of individualism and exposes the dangerous links between independence and amorality in the Old West.

Leone himself said, “the West was made by violent, uncomplicated men and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures.” To achieve this, he scrubs the Western to its base elements; he jettisons Indians, mining towns, wagon trains and the card games in saloons that dominate more traditional Hollywood Westerns and depopulates his vision of the West until nothing is left but a handful of stubborn survivors who believe violence is the only way they can impose themselves on the empty grandeur of their surroundings. 

In Leone’s West, there is no community to speak of and certainly no authority capable of taming the wild country and the barbarity of men. As a result, a wary brand of individualism – and to a lesser extent, amorality – thrives in all of his characters, because an individual in Leone’s West does not have the luxury of anything like trust in others or absolute morals. If this world has any rule it is that people must look after themselves and remember that circumstance trumps all.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a trio of opening vignettes establishes who is Good, who is Bad and who is Ugly. The sequence also forces the audience to question why these characters are described in such terms and to judge during the course of the film whether the descriptions are accurate.

As is the case with all Leone films, the dialogue is sparse – indeed, 10 minutes pass before the film’s opening line – and the characters reveal more about themselves with their eyes and their body language than they do with words: The angular figure of Lee Van Cleef standing in a doorway with one hand resting on a pistol needs no vocabulary to communicate purpose.

When the film opens, Van Cleef – the movie’s Bad character, called Angel Eyes throughout – is on the trail of a missing Confederate soldier who knows the whereabouts of a cash-box stuffed with Rebel gold. His quest for the riches eventually attracts Eastwood – the Good character – and a low-level Mexican bandit named Tuco – the Ugly character, played with a wonderfully-rotten panache by Eli Wallach.

When both Eastwood and Tuco discover clues about the gold’s location, circumstance dictates that they form an uneasy partnership and go after the treasure together. Angel Eyes soon learns what the men have discovered through a combination of sheer brutality and pragmatism. He briefly joins forces with Eastwood – butting Tuco out – in an even more unwieldy partnership, only to be driven away in the film’s penultimate gun-battle. These relationships of convenience, the switching sides – from Union to Confederate – and utilizing whatever is available – the Church, the Law or each other – all to further the quest for gold serves as a constant reminder to the viewer that none of these men has an allegiance to much of anything beyond themselves and their immediate goal.

What little moral clarity there is in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly arrives with the devastation of the Civil War. Both Angel Eyes and Tuco seemed unmoved by the conflict’s violence. To them, the war is an inconvenience, something that stands in the way of their big payday. Eastwood shares this sentiment, but he also recognizes the folly of the death all around him and it moves him to express as much compassion as his character is capable of. “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly,” he observes after watching a hopeless attack on a bridge.

Eastwood’s gradual emergence from his shield of solipsism is starkly contrasted by the company necessity has forced him to keep. At one point, Tuco is asked: “Outside of evil, what have you managed to do?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Eastwood dubs Tuco the “Rat” because of his odious personal habits and his unsavory penchant for selfishness. But as repugnant as Tuco is, he is not as bad as Angle Eyes – a committed solipsist who kills, tortures and lies his way through the film’s plot with the cool calculation of a sociopath who sees people not as people but as tools for his fulfillment.

In the film’s famous climax, Eastwood tempts the other two protagonists into a three-way duel. Initially, it appears the entire trio will have to consider both their own perceptions and those of their opponents before deciding who to shoot at. Unknown to Tuco or Angle Eyes, Eastwood emptied Tuco’s gun the night before, meaning he knows who to shoot at and knows he will survive if he shoots quick enough. Far more interesting than Eastwood’s stratagem is the fact that Tuco also chooses to fire at Angel Eyes. So it seems neither the Good or the Ugly can tolerate the Bad – and both men think they will get a better deal with each other rather than with a remorseless killer like Angel Eyes.

To put it another way, it is obvious that if Angel Eyes lived, he would have killed whoever survived the standoff because killing people is what he does (he is bad). Tuco would have killed the duel’s survivor because it would have meant more money for him (he is ugly). Eastwood splits the money with Tuco and rides away, their partnership now forever dissolved. While he might not be “good” in any absolute sense, he certainly is good in the film’s compromised world. And what is more, he seems to have learned a deeper truth the others missed: Namely, that some things are impossible to do alone. One man is not enough.

This reflection does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that one needs the society and community intentionally absented from Leone’s film, but it is a strong indication that the director is trying to say partnerships – or something like them – are important, even for rugged, individualistic gunman. Indeed, such arrangements are the building blocks of the society and community Leone’s Old West -- essentially a kill or be killed state of nature -- lacks. In this sense, Eastwood’s character has evolved, and in doing so, he points to a future where militant individualism -- and the amorality that comes with it -- will not be as necessary as it is for the men in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

In other words, civilization proper was coming to the West, it just took some time getting there. In the meanwhile, the denizens of the frontier were, well, on their own. So when Tuco tells a corpse who failed to get the drop on him: "Just shoot: Don't talk about it," the audience knows exactly what he means...