"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" - Movie vs. TV

I simply can’t remember the last time I felt compelled to go and see a film at the cinema during its first week of release. But I just couldn’t wait forTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to come out on DVD or Sky Movies. It’s my favourite spy novel – actually, one of my favourite novels in any category.

And I’ve always considered the 1979 TV version to be the best small-screen drama ever produced in Britain.  

You’ll probably have read the reviews by now, so I won’t bother adding to the monsoon of critical adulation.

Instead, I’ll look at some of the major differences between the film and TV versions.

                        

Because the movie is less than a third of the length of the TV series, a lot of material has had to be compressed. For instance, in order to retain much of the original, highly complex plot, the four main suspects’ back stories are almost entirely jettisoned, and they spend surprisingly little time on screen – I missed getting to know Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Bill Haydon and Percy Alleline this time round: we get street-artist sketches of them rather than oil portraits. (For instance, it’s hard to imagine a modern film or TV director being allowed to spend two minutes doing this.) 

Smiley’s horrible bitch of an aristocratic wife, Ann, barely exists in the film, except as a plot device. She’s a shadowy, distant figure, without a single line of dialogue. This is a distinct improvement, as one spent most of the TV series hoping that Smiley would go critical and smack her around a bit (and, before you call the police, I’ve never hit a woman in my life , and don’t generally advocate it - but if any woman in fiction ever deserved a good thrashing, it’s Ann Smiley).

The mesmerising scene in an Indian prison where Smiley tries to persuade Karla (Patrick Stewart acts his socks off without uttering a word) to defect is now simply recounted by Gary Oldman (the new Smiley, in case you’ve been living in a cave) to Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch, in particularly sparkling form). And this works well – it gives Oldman a chance to do some mildly animated acting.

The Circus offices are positively high-tech for 1973 – far more convincing than the cramped, rickety, Victorian HQ of the TV version, which always struck me as unlikely. Publishers worked in building like that back then, but one somehow doubted that the security services did.

Connie Sachs was far better done in the TV version – most of the desperation, pathos and obsessiveness conveyed by Beryl Reid’s bravura performance has been lost, which is a shame. And I couldn’t for the life of me grasp what sort of place Kathy Burke had ended up living in. A school? A drama college of some sort? Confusing.

Perhaps the film’s makers decided that no one – especially an international audience – would understand or would care about the class differences so wonderfully observed in the original. Or maybe it’s because the director is Swedish (Thomas Alfredson directed the superb horror movie Let the Right One In) and so he couldn’t care less. Percy Alleline is no longer the lanky, popmpous, bullying public school prick he was in the original. John Standing’s extremely pukka Sam Collins – the agent on duty at HQ the night the news that Jim Prideaux has been shot is received - has metamorphosed, for some odd reason, into a curly-haired, lower class Liverpudlian (but they’ve stopped short of renaming him Gary or Barry). In fact, almost everyone is more common than they used to be. Maybe that’s meant to make it more “accessible” to a modern audience – but it doesn’t ring true of Britain 38 years ago. It also means we lose all sense of Esterhase’s exotic, Hungarian strangeness and Roy Bland’s working class, Communist-father origins – equally exotic-seeming in the original.

The downplaying of class – or lack of understanding of it – is also evident in the handling of the scenes at the boarding school where Jim Prideaux has now been reduced to earning a living as a teacher. The fat boy whom Prideaux identifies as promising future spy material, Jumbo Roach - so memorably played by Duncan Jones in the original – is poorly acted and largely pointless here. That marvellous final scene in the original, in which Prideaux – who has returned to the school after killing his former lover, the traitor Bill Haydon – helps Jumbo by reciting from memory the Bible passage the boy has stumbled over while reading it in chapel, has been entirely lost. A pity. (And of course Jumbo can’t be called “Jumbo” these says, for obvious PC reasons.) The place just doesn’t feel like a boarding school would have. (And where’s Prideaux’s rant about socialists ruining everything?)

But there are several brilliant new scenes (at least, I can’t remember them from the book, although they might very well be there - they both feel as if they should be). In the first, Jim Prideaux is teaching a classroom of boys. They’re  making noisey fun of their teacher’s odd, jerky  movements at the blackboard (which might very well be standard behaviour in a modern state school, but would have earned the little bastards a walloping and a class detention in a 1970s boarding school).  A trapped bird suddenly appears, flying over the boys’ heads, panicking them. Prideaux stuns it with a lightning-fast blow of the text-book he’s holding before smashing it to death on the classroom floor, thus revealing the ex-agent’s capacity for swift action, and presaging his later murder of the exposed traitor, Haydon – another trapped animal. Clever stuff.

Then there’s a lovely little scene where Smiley and three others are riding along in a car. As we look through the back window, we see a trapped bee buzzing around inside. The driver and the other two passengers make unsuccessful, agitated attempts to kill it. Eventually Smiley, who hasn’t moved at all, quietly winds down his window, thus allowing the bee to escape. Clunkingly obvious symbolism, maybe – but ever so effective: it only takes a few seconds and it elicits a delighted laugh from the audience.

Some intriguing characters have disappeared altogether, including Ricky Tarr’s quiet, deadly little minder, Fawn, and boozy former agent, Jerry Westerby, who was kicked out after raising concerns that the Russians had known all about Prideaux’s mission in advance, and has been reduced to working for what he calls “the comic”  (presumably The Sun).

Much of the language of the original has been lost as well - no more “ju-ju  men” or “lamplighters” or “scalphunters”: either because that sort of jargon is just too larky and public school for modern tastes, or because explaining what the terms mean might have been more trouble than it’s worth. I didn’t mind their absence - but I felt something akin to pain when I realised we were never going to hear the statement “There were three of them... and Alleline”. Could have been slipped in somewhere, surely.

And I missed the scene where Ian Richardson – as Bill Haydon – reveals his reasons for defecting: essentially, a hatred of America and of Britain’s new subordinate role in the world. And the one where Connie Sachs explains that her “lovely boys” had been raised to run an empire – only to find that it had disappeared on them. Now, Haydon just says it was an aesthetic choice and complains that the West “has become so ugly”, which, as an isolated observation, isn’t particularly convincing. I’m astonished a contemporary director didn’t grasp the opportunity to garner a few more Oscar votes by rubbishing the United States (and it would no doubt have pleased John Le Carré, who now seems to regard America as the font of all evil).

Peter Guillam – a tough-guy ladies’ man in the original – is revealed to be gay. I tried to find this annoying, but it worked okay, and there’s a rumour that Britain’s security services have occasionally been known to employ players of the pink oboe.

I can’t quite remember what happens at the very end of the TV series. I think it’s that scene in the school chapel. In the movie, it consists of Gary Oldman taking his place as Percy Alleline’s successor. He gives the faintest hint of a smile of satisfaction, and you could almost hear the audience purr with pleasure at the sheer rightness of it all. Probably a little too obvious for the TV series, but a nice touch nevertheless. 

Having noted all that, please be assured that the film is a masterpieceentirely in its own right. Gary Oldman gives the performance of his career and Benedict Cumberbatch is a revelation: despite being an Old Harrovian, he may just be the best actor of his generation. (A shiver of sheer pleasure runs along the audience’s collective spine when the horizontal lift doors open behind slimy little Toby Esterhase to reveal Peter Guillam smiling menacingly, waiting to take him for a ride). 

I almost wish I was still a BAFTA member just so I could vote for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in every category. It’s that good.

And I can’t wait to see it again. And again. And again…