It's on that very border that we meet Leamus (the great Richard Burton), a lugubrious but attentive British spy who is waiting for fellow spy Riemeck to arrive from a mission in East Berlin. Taking nips of coffee and brandy in the West Berlin station, he watches as Riemeck is gunned down while crossing by agents under the eye of German master spy Mundt (Peter Van Eyck). Arriving back in Britain, Control (Cyril Cusack) informs Leamus that he has one more mission before he can retire or, as Control puts it, 'come in from the cold.'
The mission is to pose as a defector, one who might eventually be picked up by the Germans to spill government secrets. He takes a job at a small library where he begins a small romance with a Communist bookkeeper named Nan (Claire Bloom) and drinks like a fish so as to stage a brawl that lands him in jail, where he finds the attention of a company called The Link that recruits defectors. Leamus passes between the hands of low level agents, including an interrogator named Peters (Sam Wanamaker),and eventually lands with Fiedler (a very good Oskar Werner), a high-level Jewish spy who works for the East Germans.
In the John le Carré novel that Ritt's film is based on, the character of German mastermind Mundt had been set up in a preceding novel (Call for the Dead). The reader knew who was on the other end of the phone. One of the great enigmas of Ritt's film is that we see Mundt for only a few minutes, but he is ever present in the film's narrative. Leamus' assignment is to get Fiedler to turn on Mundt through a series of double-crosses that had been set up long ago by Control. But the film's powerful hold comes not just from the deceptions that the characters enact on each other but how deceit, in this world that they thrive in, is as natural and consistent as the ground they walk on.
When the film was released in 1965, Ritt had made his name on several '60s neo-Westerns made with his staple lead Paul Newman and would immediately return to both in 1967 with the white-Indian character drama Hombre. There are shades of this sort of ruthless restraint in his most popular film, 1963's Hud, but Spy remains a strange one-off for the New York native, seeing as he would go on to direct racial dramas (Sounder, The Great White Hope) and weepy romances (Stanley & Iris) until his death in 1990.
Whatever the reason, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains, along with Hud and The Front, one of Ritt's most invigorating and controlled works. In its realistic depiction of the world of spies in both intrigue and deception, the film feels like an honest corrective to the James Bond series: women as a sincere weakness rather than playthings, physical stunts replaced by the most complex of psychological war games, allegiance as a finicky state at best. The mood seems to have lived on in the world of the Iraq Occupation in a film like Ridley Scott's Body of Lies but while that film is naturally encumbered by the sound of everything exploding, Spy's whispers and hushed correspondences more convincingly echo a life where paranoia is an invaluable tool of survival.
The Criterion DVD includes a second disc which includes an interview with le Carre, selected-scene commentary, a 2000 BBC documentary about le Carre, an interview with Burton from 1967, and a 1985 audio interview between Ritt and film historian Patrick McGilligan.
