Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV Mini-Series 1979) - IMDb Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced out of semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6's echelons. Stars: a list of 35 titles created 06 Aug 2011 a list of 38 titles created 21 Feb 2014 a list of 34 titles created 23 Jan 2015 a list of 38 titles created 03 Feb 2015 a list of 25 titles created 5 months ago Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) 8.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 Primetime Emmy. Another 4 wins & 7 nominations.

See more awards » Photos Smiley's People (TV Mini-Series 1982) Drama | Mystery Called out of retirement to settle the affairs of a friend, Smiley finds his old organization, the Circus, so overwhelmed by political considerations that it doesn't want to know what ... See full summary » Stars: Alec Guinness, Eileen Atkins, Bill Paterson British agent Alec Leamas refuses to come in from the Cold War during the 1960s, choosing to face another mission, which may prove to be his final one. Director: Martin Ritt A Perfect Spy (TV Mini-Series 1987) Thriller This is the story of Magnus Pym, from his childhood to the end of his career in middle age. As a young man, there is little doubt that his father Rick was the most influential character in ... See full summary » Stars: Ray McAnally, Rüdiger Weigang, Alan Howard The missions of an elite British Intelligence covert operations unit. Stars: Roy Marsden, Ray Lonnen, Jerome Willis In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6.

Director: Tomas Alfredson Francis Urquhart is the chief whip of the Conservative party. When Margaret Thatcher resigns as leader, he remains neutral and after a general election where the conservatives are returned ... See full summary » Stars: Ian Richardson, Susannah Harker, Miles Anderson State of Play (TV Mini-Series 2003) Crime | Drama | Mystery A thriller set in London, in which a politician's life becomes increasingly complex as his research assistant is found dead on the London Underground and, in a seemingly unrelated incident, a teenage pickpocket is shot dead. Stars: John Simm, Kelly Macdonald, Bill Nighy David Callan is the top agent/assassin for the Security Service (British counterintelligence), but he is an embittered man who performs his duties "for Queen and country" under duress. This... See full summary » Stars: Edward Woodward, Russell Hunter, Lisa Langdon Edit Storyline George Smiley has been retired for about a year when he finds a friend from the Circus, his old outfit in British Intelligence, sitting in his living room.

He is taken to the home of an advisor to the Prime Minister on intelligence matters, where he finds evidence that one of the men in the senior ranks of his old agency is a Russian spy. Smiley is asked to find him, without official access to any of the files in the Circus or letting on that anyone is under suspicion. With only a few old friends, his own powers of deduction, and secrecy as weapons, Smiley must unearth the spy who turned him out of the Circus. Written by John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net> Who can spy on the spies? See more » Genres: 29 September 1980 (USA) See more » Also Known As: König, Dame, As, Spion See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia While talking to Smiley about his encounter with Toby Esterhase, Ian Bannen 's character Jim Prideaux says "He (Esterhase) said the Circus had nearly gone under due to Operation Testify and I'm currently the number one leper..." Years later, Bannen played a leper in Braveheart (1995).

See more » Goofs During the outdoor daytime scene where Smiley converses with Prideaux, they are tracked by the camera as they walk across a field. At one point, when they are nearest the camera, the shadows of some crew members are just about visible on Prideaux's coat. See more » Quotes [Lacon has arrived late for a conference] Oliver Lacon : I'm sorry. Traffic. I should've walked. Bill Haydon : I think you and Percy between you are contriving to keep me off the streets. See more » Crazy Credits The opening credits show a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. One doll opens up to reveal a doll more irate than the other one, and the final doll is seen as being faceless. This was inspired by a line at the end of the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" novel: "Smiley settled on a picture of one of those little Russian dolls that open up to reveal one inside the other, and another inside him.

Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside..." See more » Connections ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,’ With Alec Guinness - Review - The New York Times The New York Times Television |Spycraft Dispensed With Appropriate, Deliberate Speed Search Continue reading the main story Photo From left, Bernard Hepton, Ian Richardson, Michael Aldridge and Terence Rigby in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Credit Acorn Media “DO you know what’s killing Western democracy, George? Greed. And constipation. Moral, political, aesthetic. I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses institutionalized.” A diatribe overheard at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests?

No, think much earlier: a disenchanted British spy complaining about the state of the world in the late 1970s to his old colleague George Smiley in the much lauded television adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” With a new feature film of that novel scheduled to open in December , starring Gary Oldman as Smiley and Colin Firth as the America hater Bill Haydon, there’s still time to discover or revisit the 1979 TV version, which came out five years after the book. (Acorn Media is rereleasing the three-disc, 324-minute DVD set on Tuesday, with a list price of $49.99.) Those too young to remember the post-Watergate years can get from the mini-series a flavor of the gloom and alienation that hung in the air on both sides of the Atlantic; in his review of the novel , Anatole Broyard of The New York Times wrote that no sociologist “has succeeded so well in dramatizing the sense of doom that pervades contemporary politics.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The cynicism of Mr.

le Carré’s spies has lost its power to shock over the intervening three decades. What may strike the first-time viewer of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” the most, especially if he has an image of it as a groundbreaking television production, is how slow moving and classically proportioned it is. Audiences used to the pace of the modern TV crime or espionage drama will need to reorient themselves. Continue reading the main story The director John Irvin and the screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft did a lot of compressing and reordering to make Mr. le Carré’s complex 355-page novel about Smiley’s hunt for a mole at the highest levels of the British secret services work on screen. But the nearly five-and-a-half-hour running time of the mini-series still allowed for long, leisurely sequences demonstrating the mechanics of the spy trade. Photo Alec Guinness as George Smiley in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Credit Acorn Media The script preserves the novel’s back-and-forth-in-time structure, and Episode 2 begins with an uninterrupted half-hour flashback recalling the seduction of a Russian agent in Lisbon.

It provides some necessary information (as well as the program’s only depiction of sex), but in dramatic terms it’s a complete digression, something that now would be covered in a quick montage or a few lines of dialogue. Along with the deliberate speed comes a lack of physical action, reflecting Mr. le Carré’s emphasis on moral and political questions over suspense and derring-do. The mini-series begins with its one true action sequence (a canny decision by Hopcraft and Mr. Irvin); the next five hours are dominated by scenes of Smiley conferring with his small group of confidants and interviewing people who might be able to lead him toward the mole. A few scenes involving Smiley’s protégé, Guillam, pilfering information from headquarters stoke the tension, and the final confrontation with the villain involves guns and some running around. But even that scene is remarkably genteel by current standards.

The suspense-procedural style of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” with its echoes of “The Day of the Jackal” and the American conspiracy thrillers of the early 1970s, has continued to thrive in British television; notable examples include the mini-series “Edge of Darkness” (1985) and “State of Play” (2003), both remade as American feature films. There has been very little like it in American TV however. The closest recent comparisons, if only in terms of being quiet and slow, have been on the cable channel AMC: “Rubicon,” canceled after one season, and “The Killing,” which viewers appeared to lose patience with after a strong start. Of course those shows didn’t have the ace in the hole that “Tinker, Tailor” did: the improbable presence of one of the 20th century’s great film actors, Alec Guinness , as Smiley. It’s conventional wisdom that Guinness’s performance is a landmark in TV history, and you won’t get an argument here, though if you’re watching it for the first time, you may wonder at the start what all the fuss is about.

But then you start to notice that Hopcraft’s dialogue tends to sound a bit starchy in the mouths of everyone but Smiley (even though the cast included top British stage and film actors like Ian Richardson, Ian Bannen and Michael Aldridge). Early on, Smiley, who was the central character in five le Carré novels, passes along a lesson from his mentor: “Good intelligence work is gradual and rests on a kind of gentleness.” It’s an excellent description of how Guinness builds the character. Much of what we know about Smiley accumulates through his reactions to the lies and sad truths that he hears, in slight movements of the eyes and in his capacity for surprise, an analogue for the idealism, or perhaps just devotion to his craft, that drives him. In a 2002 interview included in the DVD set Mr. le Carré famously said of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”: “If I were going to keep one filmed version of my work, this would be it.” At that point several fine film adaptations of his work had come out — directors like John Boorman (“The Tailor of Panama”) and Fred Schepisi (“The Russia House”) had improved on the original material — but Mr.

le Carré can be forgiven for preferring the production that was most faithful to his own vision, and the actor who so expertly embodied his most famous creation. A version of this review appears in print on October 23, 2011, on Page AR25 of the New York edition with the headline: Spycraft Dispensed With Appropriate, Deliberate Speed. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Forget the Film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: See the BBC Original | The Huffington Post Forget the Film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: See the BBC Original 03/30/2012 05:07 pm ET | Updated May 30, 2012 Eric Margolis Veteran Journalist, Author Writing about films is not something I often do, but as an old Cold Warrior who has covered intelligence matters for decades and been involved in a few, the thrilling book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is right up my dark alley. John Le Carré's Cold War espionage trilogy, which also includes, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, is the finest work on the world of intelligence ever written.

Le Carré served in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and knows of what he writes. He masterfully captures all the bureaucratic tedium and moments of terror of spy work, its lies, double-dealing, and betrayals. The 1976 BBC TV version of Tinker, Tailor and the sequel, Smiley's People, was the best thing I have ever seen on TV. It was perfect. Full stop. Only the BBC series I, Claudius came near it. John Le Carré stated the BBC version was "complete" and should not be remade. I felt the same way, fearing that a remake would inevitably disappoint. A remake should at least bring new depth or, for commercial purposes, contemporary sensibility and familiar faces. Alas, the 2011 Anglo-French film version by director Tomas Alfredson that came out recently detracts rather than adds to this epic tale. Don't get me wrong. The film is well made and interesting. But it has tried to compress Le Carré's large cast of fascinating characters and murky, jig-saw puzzle of patient detection into an all-too-brief two hours.

Inevitably, the film produces only one finely-etched character, Smiley, very well played by a somber Gary Oldman. But trying to follow the genius of Alec Guinness, who played Smiley for the BBC, is an impossible act to follow. Guiness actually became spymaster George Smiley. Just as that other great British actor, Jeremy Brett, first assumed, then has taken over by the character of Sherlock Holmes. Sadly, the other wonderful characters in the BBC series that Le Carré brought to vivid life become mere cardboard cutouts in the 2011 film. The slippery Hungarian chief of the Lamplighters, Toby Esterhase; Bill Hayden, the charming seducer of one and all; insufferably pompous Sir Percy Alliline; gruff, chain-smoking Roy Bland; and Jim Prideaux, betrayed on a mission behind the Iron Curtain by the man he loved. Having grown up in New York's theater world, I've seen many moments of memorable drama, but none more so than the wonderful scene in the Smiley's People where Toby Esterhase kidnaps a Soviet diplomat wonderfully played by the Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale.

Watching Smiley slowly, relentlessly deconstruct the blustering Soviet official into a blubbering mess is one of cinema's supreme scenes. Sadly, it's not in the 2011 film. Nor is the shadowy Karla, grand spymaster of Moscow Center. Perhaps he will reappear in future sequel to the new film? Viewers of the film won't understand the great underlying drama of the Philby treason. The fictitious Philby-like character, Bill Hayden, weakly played by Colin Firth, only hints at the monster treachery that lies beneath. The real Philby , a gifted son of Britain's elite who grew to hate the West, became a senior figure at British intelligence and its liason with CIA in Washington. Philby betrayed scores of Western operations and agents behind the Iron Curtain, some of whom were executed, including a relative of mine. Equally damaging, Philby convinced CIA's powerful chief of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton, that the Agency was riddled with KGB moles. As a result, both MI6 and CIA were, to use Le Carré's term, "turned inside out" and crippled by frantic witch hunts and galloping paranoia.

Philby and his fellow spies in Britain's establishment, known as the "Cambridge Five," are generally considered the most destructive Soviet agents of the era. But when I was invited into the KGB's top secret museum in Moscow, the curator assured me that George Blake, who was not part of Philby's coterie, had been, in fact, the most effective Soviet spy in Britain. Reading Blake's notebooks made me feel ice cold. In Smiley's People, Smiley and his old team hunt and then trap Karla through his one human weakness, his daughter. In reality, I saw something eerily similar happen to one of the very top Soviet leaders in the 1970's. As an old Cold Warrior, I do miss the thrill and drama of the conflict each and every day. The Soviets were redoubtable, worthy foes. As Japanese samurai used to say, honor in battle is commensurate to the might of your enemy. Thank you, Le Carré for keeping these exciting memories alive. copyright Eric S.

Margolis 2012 Follow Eric Margolis on Twitter: More: Everything you need to know about “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” - Salon.com Monday, Dec 19, 2011 6:15 PM UTC Everything you need to know about “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” Whether you want a Cold War primer or hope to go deeper into 2011's most acclaimed thriller, this is your guide Topics: Everything You Need To Know About... , Tinker Tailor Solider Spy , Entertainment News Gary Oldman in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" The Circus is MI6, Britain’s version of the CIA. “C” is “Control,” the murky and mysterious man atop MI6. But what’s the best way to keep track of the film’s timeline? And what about the shadow cast by Alec Guinness, who played George Smiley in a seven-hour 1979 BBC mini-series.

The new adaptation of John Le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is one of the best reviewed films of the Oscar season — but just as context and information is everything in the spy business, some background makes the film more meaningful as well, whether you’re about to see it for the first time or whether you have questions you want to discuss further. This expert guide will both deepen the film and provide the ultimate cheat sheet. But are we missing any clues? Let us know with a post on Open Salon , and we’ll continue to update this list with your best ideas. Author, Author John Le Carré is the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell. Or is it James David Cornwell? Sources, typically, differ.

Either way, John Le Carré (in French, John the Square) is certainly David Cornwell, who was born on October 19, 1931, graduated from Oxford, taught at Eton and worked as a British spy for both MI5 (the section concerned with activities in Britain itself) and MI6 (the bit that deals with affairs abroad.) Then, in 1964, his third novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” became a smash and he quit to become a full-time writer. The Figure in the Carpet Simultaneous with this first success, Le Carré was drawn into, or plunged into, a triangular affair with an older writer, James Kennaway, and Kennaway’s wife Susan. Literary records of the tempestuous and passionate mess that ensued exist in James Kennaway’s novel “Some Gorgeous Accident,” in ‘The Kennaway Papers” (a memoir assembled by Susan after her husband’s death in a car crash), and in Le Carré’s “A Naïve and Sentimental Lover,” the only of his many novels thus far in which he definitively deserts spies and the clandestine corridors of power.

These days, Le Carré terms “A Naïve and a Sentimental Lover” a “massive embarrassment.” The book flopped, but its background provides a codex to the masterpiece that followed — 1974’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” an altogether tidier and more designed piece of work, featuring tight love triangles, patterns of deception that, like illicit affairs, require fantastic concentration, and betrayals made all the more heinous by virtue of their intimacy. Treachery in “Tinker, Tailor” isn’t just about national secrets; it wears the soft suede shoes of a supposed ally and close friend. Here, in this world, the bullet that strikes you between the shoulder blades has been handed to your enemy by that particular person you deludedly most trust. “Tinker, Tailor” deals with shattered illusions and the foul dreads that float in their wake. There is, too, a barely submerged gay love story at the core.

The Cambridge Spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt – real men in history who rose high in the British secret services and who, it would turn out, had been working as Soviet agents all along, having been recruited while at Cambridge during the heady leftist days of the 1930s. Their stories, so emblematic of failed imperial promise, continue to obsess the British imagination. Alan Bennett, for instance, has written funny and haunting plays about both Burgess and Blunt. Le Carré knew Kim Philby, the most effective and dangerous of the spies, and disliked and distrusted him, sensing that Philby had taken a road that might have been dangerously open to him, too. Philby fled to Moscow more than a decade before “Tinker, Tailor” was published, but Anthony Blunt (by then Sir Anthony Blunt, and in charge of the Queen’s art ) was about to be exposed. Luck, then, and historical serendipity, played its part in the success of Le Carré’s novel, which features the hunt for just such a traitor.

A Topographical Joke In “Tinker, Tailor,” Le Carré dubs MI6 ‘The Circus’, and gives its HQ a specific location, in the heart of London’s West End, where Shaftesbury Avenue meets Charing Cross Road, above a shabby shop at the northeast corner of Cambridge Circus. In fact, MI6 is located elsewhere, but Le Carré’s gag was apt. For years, the British secret service really had been little more than had been a circus, born in Cambridge yet Moscow-run. Moles and Other Lingo “Tinker, Tailor” is full of insider lore, most notably the word “mole” to describe a long-term spy who has penetrated and still works within an enemy’s secret service. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary asked Le Carré whether he’d invented this pleasing metaphor. Le Carré replied that he wasn’t sure.

In fact, the term dates back to Francis Bacon, who in his “Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh,” published in 1641, wrote: “As for his secret Spialls, which he did employ at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: Hee had such Moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him.” Other terms – “lamplighter” (pavement artist), “scalp-hunter” (muscle), “baby-sitter” (minder, bodyguard) – contribute to the sense that Le Carré is taking us deep inside the secret world and knows whereof he speaks. He does, and many of these conceits and usages, which Le Carré did make up himself, have been subsequently adopted by other writers and professional spies. Chinese Boxes/Russian Dolls “Tinker, Tailor” has an intricate structure, befitting the foxy complexities of its subject. The central character, George Smiley, the master spy brought back from his enforced retirement, journeys into a past where the traces have been willfully kicked over.

The flashbacks that unfurl within flashbacks, the stories that nestle within stories, can be tricky to follow even on the page. Le Carré has written that he originally started writing about “a solitary and embittered man living alone on a Cornish cliff.” The character’s name was Jim Prideaux and he’d been betrayed. Le Carré, dissatisfied with this early draft, took it out into his garden and burned it – such is the diligence of genius. In the final, published version he put the sad and dogged Smiley center stage and made him burrow into a labyrinth. But Jim Prideaux remains the key to the paths that Smiley has to follow. The novel starts with Jim Prideaux in the present, before delving back in time. The new movie starts with Prideaux in the past, on a mission he doesn’t know has been compromised. If the story seems oblique, and the two-hour theatrical version is inevitably more elliptical than the seven hours of television that were made by the BBC in 1979, then remember that what happens and happened to Jim Prideaux is the clue.

The narrative fabric begins with him being cut, as it were, and ends with him doing some vengeful chopping of his own. Already a Historical Novel The story happens in the early 1970s, with the Cold War still freezing away. The U.S.A. stands in one corner, the grim legions of the Soviet Union in the other. Britain, America’s most special ally (or so the Brits still care to think), is desperate to show it still has a role to play. Le Carré’s traitor exploits the anger and puzzlement that burn behind this sense of loss. The whole piece has a dying fall, as if bugles blowing for sad shires accompany Smiley’s every padding footstep. Nosferatu The news in Britain during the early 1970s was of high unemployment, labor problems and the troubles in Northern Ireland at their bloodiest. “Tinker, Tailor’s” wintry mise-en scene perfectly reflects the era. Smiley wonders through a London of piled-up garbage and shabby misery. “Outside the window the weather continued foul,” runs a typical sentence.

Tomas Alfredson, the director whose breakout film “Let the Right One In” placed the undead in the freezing greyness of a contemporary Swedish suburb, is thus an inspired choice to render the almost Balkan gloom of Le Carré’s original. And Smiley is a vampire in his own way, a character brought back from professional death to exact justice. Guinness v. Oldman Sir Alec Guinness made Smiley iconic with his 1979 BBC portrayal, in effect wresting the character away from Le Carré, his creator, let alone any future pretender to the part. Guinness constructed a portrayal of elephantine slowness, again and again removing his enormous spectacles and rubbing them on his grubby silk tie before surprisingly fixing his antagonist with a basilisk stare. Gary Oldman, another chameleon of an actor, delivers a performance of different effect. He just breathes, sometimes barely, and yet he too conveys a sense of Smiley’s cool formidableness. Those hidden eyes miss nothing, and the emotion they exhibit is, not disgust at treason, but a wider and more philosophical sadness for the entire human endeavor, the mire and fury that runs through men and women’s veins.

Knowledge is the weapon that this character carries, and the burden too. James Bond, obviously, he isn’t. Smiley’s almost a cipher, but Oldman, like Guinness before, gives him a poetry. Richard Rayner's books include "Los Angeles Without A Map," "The Blue Suit," "The Cloud Sketcher" and "A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age." He has written for the New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, The Los Angeles Times and many other publications. He was born in the north of England and attended Cambridge. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Series) - TV Tropes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share Series / Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy × WMG Alec Guinness as George Smiley "I've got a story to tell you, it's all about spies.

And if it's true, which I think it is, you boys are gonna need a whole new organisation..." — Ricki Tarr, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a seven-part miniseries based on the first book in John le Carrï¿½ 's The Quest for Karla trilogy; it aired in 1979 and starred Alec Guinness as British Intelligence officer George Smiley. He reprised the role in Smiley's People, made in 1981 and based on the third book in the same trilogy.note The middle installment, The Honourable Schoolboy, was deemed too difficult to film due to budget constraints. Together, the chronicle Smiley's conflict with his opposite number in Moscow Centre , a legendary spymaster known as Karla ( Patrick Stewart ), and thematically deal with the minutiae of spy work and the emotional toll it wreaks on people's lives. These series provide examples of: Actually Pretty Funny : Haydon can't help but chuckle the entire way through Peter's interrogation by the Circus leaders, where Guillam snarks at Alleline the entire time.

As You Know : George Smiley puts out a couple of milkbottles on the steps of a safehouse, then goes inside and confirms that this is, in fact, the correct 'It's safe to come in' signal. Peter: Yes George, for the second time. Smiley: Is it? Well let's not pretend we're not nervous. Batman Gambit : Karla's plan in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Because of the very particular way that the "source" Merlin operates, the heads of the Circus not only don't bother searching for a mole, they actively stop others from doing the same, because they believe they're keeping their own agent safe. Battle Butler : Fawn. Pretty handy with a karate chop. Bi the Way : Connie Sachs is flirtatious with the men in the Circus, and is revealed to be in a romantic relationship with a former female Circus employee in Smiley's People. Chiaroscuro : There is a lot of this. The credits sequence lists "Photography" as by Tony Pierce-Roberts, and puts his name before that of the producer. (Karla) prominently among the main cast, even though he has approximately three minutes of screen time and zero lines.

Cassandra Truth : Smiley's earlier warning that there was a mole was ignored, as it was assumed that he was trying to save Control from being fired. The Museum of Broadcast Communications - Encyclopedia of Television - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY British Thriller/Miniseries When first broadcast in September 1979, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was greeted with opposing voices as "turgid, obscure, and pretentious" or as "a great success." It is in keeping with the ambiguous nature of John Le Carr�'s narratives that one can simultaneously agree with both formulations without contradiction. As Roy Bland, paraphrasing Scott Fitzgerald observes: "An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function". The obscurity is a consequence of the themes of deception and duplicity at the centre of the narrative: to those who, like Sir Hugh Greene, prefer the moral certainties of Buchan's version of British Intelligence, Le Carr�'s world will not only be difficult to follow but morally perplexing.

On the other hand, the success of the serial was not only demonstrated by good audience ratings but by general critical acclaim for the acting, a judgment ratified by subsequent BAFTA awards for best actor (Alec Guinness) and for the camerawork of Tony Pierce-Roberts. Ambiguity persisted in America where the serial won critical acclaim when shown on PBS but failed to be taken up by the networks. Although Le Carr� published his first novel, Call For the Dead, in 1961, and his first major success The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was turned into a film in 1966, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was his first venture into television. He rejected the project of turning it into a film because of the compression, but felt the space afforded by TV serialization would do justice to his narrative. He was also impressed with the skill of Arthur Hopcraft's screenplay which extensively reordered the structure of the novel to clarify the narrative for a television audience without violating its essential character (Hopcraft for example begins the narrative with the debacle in Czechoslovakia which only begins to be treated in the novel in chapter 27).

Le Carr� was even more taken by the interpretation of Smiley provided by Alec Guinness, so much so that as he was writing Smiley's People he found himself visualizing Guinness in the role and incorporated some of the insights afforded by the actor in the sequel to the trilogy. A trivial example will stand for many. During the production of Tinker Tailor, Guinness complained that the characterizing idiosyncrasy of Smiley, polishing his glasses with the fat end of his tie, cannot be done naturally because the cold weather in London means that Smiley will be wearing a three piece suit, thus a handkerchief has to be substituted. At the end of Smiley's People Le Carr� includes a teasingly oblique rejoinder: From long habit, Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was absently polishing them on the fat end of his tie, even though he had to delve for it among the folds of his tweed coat. (emphasis added) The story of Tinker, Tailor has an archetypal simplicity reminiscent of the Odyssey: the scorned outsider investigates the running of the kingdom, tests the loyalty of his subjects and kin by means of plausible stories before disposing of the usurpers and restoring right rule.

In Le Carre's modern story the elements are transposed onto the landscape of conflicted modern Europe in the throes of Cold War. A botched espionage operation in Czechoslovakia ensures that Control (Head of British Intelligence) and his associates are discredited. Shortly after, Control dies, George Smiley his able lieutenant is retired and the two are succeeded by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhaze. Six months later Riki Tarr, a maverick Far Eastern agent, turns up in London with a story suggesting there is a mole (a deeply concealed double agent) in the Circus (intelligence HQ, located at Cambridge Circus). Lacon of the Cabinet Office entices Smiley out of retirement to investigate the story. Smiley gradually pieces together the story by analyzing files, interrogating witnesses and trawling through his own memory and those of other retired Circus personnel, notably Connie Sachs (a brilliant cameo role played by Beryl Reid) until he finally unmasks the mole "Gerald" at the heart of the Circus. The mood of the story, however, is far from simple.

Duplicity and betrayal, personal as well as public (Smiley's upperclass wife is sexually promiscuous, betraying him to "Gerald") informs every aspect of the scene. While the traitor is eventually unmasked the corrupt nature of the intelligence service serves as a microcosm of contemporary England: secretive, manipulative, class-ridden, materialistic and emotionally sterile. Thus, if the Augean stables have been cleaned, they will be soon be soiled again. This downbeat tone accounts for the serial not being taken up by the American networks and marks it off from the charismatic spy adventures of James Bond, but it also accounts for its particular appeal to British middle-brow audiences. The spy genre is virtually a British invention: although other countries produce spy writers, the centrality of the genre to British culture is longstanding and inescapable: John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton as well as John Le Carr� have all achieved international success for their spy stories (not to mention television dramas by Dennis Potter (The Blade on the Feather) and Alan Bennett (An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution).

To account for this obsession with spies we only have to consider the political circumstances of Britain in the twentieth century: a declining Imperial power, whose overseas possessions have to be ruled and defended more by information than by outright physical force; an offshore island of a divided Europe; seeing itself threatened by German, then Soviet military ambitions. Perhaps even more significant than these external threats are those from within. A ruling class which maintains its grip on power by exclusion--a public school and Oxbridge educated elite hold a disproportionate share of positions of power in Cabinet, Whitehall, the BBC and government institutions--is liable to marginalize or demonize those who openly challenge its assumptions. The result is liable to be subversion from within--a tactic fostered by the duplicitous jockeyings for power of rival gangs in the enclosed masculine world of the public schools. The symbolic and emotional link between the world of the public school and that of the circus is established in Tinker Tailor by Jim Prideaux. The injured and betrayed agent teaches at a prep school after his failed Czech mission and enlists the aid of a hero-worshipping pupil as his watcher. Thus the fictions that Le Carr� invented have their counterpart in the real world and tap familiar English fears and obsessions.

In the same year, 1979, that saw the serialization of Tinker Tailor, the BBC also produced two documentary series Public School and Spy reinforcing the connections with Le Carr�'s work. "The Climate of Treason" concerned itself with speculating about the Fourth Man of the Burgess, MacLean, Philby double agents within MI5. On 15 November 1979 Mrs Thatcher identified Sir Anthony Blunt, adviser of the Queen's Pictures and Drawings as the Fourth man who had been recruited by the Russians in the 1930s. Le Carr�'s novel was read as a fictionalized version of these events. The success of Tinker Tailor lies in the realism, not only of character portrayal--and the acting of Alec Guinness has achieved as definitive a performance as Olivier's Richard III or Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell--but of the way in which intelligence institutions work.

But the claim for realism must not be pressed too far: Le Carr� has admitted that the vocabulary used was invented: babysitters, lamplighters, the Circus, the nursery, moles--though he was also amused to discover that real agents had begun to appropriate some of his vocabulary once the stories were published. Moreover, much intelligence work is bureaucratic and boring: Smiley's reflections turn the drudgery of reading files into a fascinating intellectual puzzle which, unlike the real experience, always produces significant information. At the symbolic level, however, the portrayal of the workings of bureaucracy is authentic: bureaucracies serve those who govern by gathering, processing and controlling access to information. In a world increasingly governed by means of information, those who control it have power and wealth, so that the resonance of Le Carr�'s story will carry beyond the cold war setting that is its point of departure.

-Brendan Kenny Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | Hannah Howe Hannah Howe Novels , Television Alec Guinness , Classic Television , John le Carre , Spy Stories , Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Goylake Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Although considered a spy story, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is also a detective story with oodles of class. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was broadcast on the BBC in 1979. The series was adapted from the 1974 novel of the same name, written by John le Carré, and it starred Alec Guinness, Michael Jayston, Anthony Bate, George Sewell, Bernard Hepton, Ian Richardson, Ian Bannen, Hywel Bennett and Beryl Reid. Critically acclaimed, Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy won a number of awards, including a Best Actor BAFTA for Alec Guinness. The plot of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy centres on George Smiley (Alec Guinness) and his search for a ‘mole’ at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service, the ‘Circus’.

As the story unfolds we learn that Smiley was forced to retire as deputy head of the S.I.S. because of a bungled operation in Czechoslovakia and that he is estranged from his wife, Ann, played by Siân Phillips. World-weary, but determined, Smiley embarks on a secret investigation, trawling through the murky waters of Cold War espionage and his past. Because the theme of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy is one of betrayal the identity of the ‘mole’ is no great surprise. However, a fine ensemble cast hold your interest throughout and Alec Guinness, in his first major television role, makes the character of George Smiley his own. While researching the role of George Smiley, Alec Guinness asked author John le Carré to introduce him to a real spy – forgetting that John le Carré had himself worked for MI5 and MI6 during the 1950s and 1960s – and a meeting with Sir Maurice Oldfield, the Chief of the British Intelligence Service from 1973-78, was arranged.

At the meeting, in a Chelsea restaurant, Alec Guinness studied Sir Maurice Oldfield intently, from the way he walked, to the way he carried his umbrella, to his mannerisms when he picked up and drank from a wineglass. And it was that attention to detail from the writer, actors and producers that made Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy such a special series. Share this: Revisiting The First 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' : NPR Revisiting The First 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' Embed Embed Revisiting The First 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' Revisiting The First 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' Embed Embed In the 1979 BBC series, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, director John Irvin created a dreary depiction of the British Secret Service. Acorn Media hide caption toggle caption Acorn Media In the 1979 BBC series, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, director John Irvin created a dreary depiction of the British Secret Service. Acorn Media 'Tinker, Tailor': The Greatest Spy Story Ever Told Nov.

1, 2011 John Le Carre's Cold War espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is enjoying a resurgence among today's audiences. Gary Oldman stars in a 2011 film adaptation of the book — often called Le Carre's finest — as master spy George Smiley, recalled from forced retirement to root out a traitor in the top ranks of the British intelligence service. While the 2011 film may be some viewers' first introduction to the story, many others will remember the iconic 1979 BBC mini-series starring Alec Guinness, recently released on DVD. The multi-part series slowly unravels a labyrinthine tale of intrigue, petty rivalries and bureaucracy against a dreary Cold War backdrop. John Irvin, director of the original series, joins NPR's Neal Conan to talk about how he crafted his adaptation and why the story still resonates today, more than two decades after the end of the Cold War. NEAL CONAN, HOST: In the new movie "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," master spy George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman, recalls what he told his Soviet counterpart and nemesis Karla to try to get him to defect.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY") GARY OLDMAN: (as George Smiley) We're not so very different, you and I. We both spend our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. Don't you think it's time to recognize there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine? CONAN: This new version of John le Carre's classic Cold War thriller inevitably faces comparison to the BBC TV series first broadcast in 1979 that starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY") ALEC GUINNESS: (as George Smiley) I'm not offering you wealth or smart women or your choice of fast cars. I know you have no use for those things. And I'm not going to make any claims about the moral superiority of the West. I'm sure you can see through our values, just as I can see through yours in the East. You and I have spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in each other's systems.

I'm sure each of us has experienced innumerable technical satisfactions in our wretched Cold War. CONAN: In a moment, the man who directed that BBC miniseries joins us. If you have questions for John Irvin about either version, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email, talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. John Irvin joins us now from the studios of the BBC in London. His version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" is now available on DVD from Acorn Media. He's gone on to direct more than 40 films and television programs, including "Hamburger Hill" and "The Dogs of War." John Irvin, nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today. JOHN IRVIN: It's a great pleasure to be here. CONAN: I know you've seen the new film directed by Swedish director Tomas Alfredson. What do you think? IRVIN: I think he's a very good director.

Obviously, the film in the theater is very different from the version that we made, which went out on the BBC some 30 years ago. I don't think you could make comparisons, really. They're two different animals. I enjoyed it, and it was very thoughtful. It was very stylish, and it was engrossing. I know the story pretty well, so I wasn't lost. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) CONAN: It helps to have read the book, doesn't it? IRVIN: It does. Yes, yes. It's a tricky one. But, no, I thought - I was - obviously, it was rather like looking in the mirror and seeing somebody completely different looking back at you. But I did enjoy it, and as I said, it was done with tremendous panache, and I enjoyed that. CONAN: You faced - I'm sorry to interrupt. But you faced what you must have felt were hellish choices compressing the book to, what, five-and-a-half hours. They had two. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) IRVIN: I know. I don't know how they did it.

I mean, we thought we were compressing the story, and we thought we were, you know, we were hard pressed. But I - it is - the heart of it is really quite simple. It is, obviously, dressed up as an extraordinary, thrilling, suspenseful, you know, mystery. And I think the way I directed it and the way I saw it is very different from the way, you know, the present film is envisioned. But I think they're both - I mean, they're both valid. I saw my version as a, you know, as a labyrinth, with a very dark secret in the center of it. And I based my version on the corridors of the BBC. CONAN: Oh, really? IRVIN: This circus, it was a combination in my imagination really of all the intrigues, jealousies, rivalries within the departments of the BBC and combined with my schoolmasters, my boarding school, when I was - where I was very unhappy. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) IRVIN: So I was able to get my revenge... (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) CONAN: You couldn't actually take any of them out and shoot them, so.

IRVIN: ...both on the BBC and my school, yes. CONAN: So there is, speaking of shooting, one action sequence in both the movie and your version. It's right at the beginning. This is a little different from the spy thrillers that people had been accustomed, starring people like James Bond. IRVIN: Indeed. This is - I mean, the ending sequence in our version was set in a forest. There's - it makes your pulse race. It's a man running for his life, chased by dogs. Here, it's an assassination - in Budapest. I think - you know, I think it's - it was never - it's never - it was never going to be compared with James Bond. But what's interesting is that Alec Guinness, the most thoughtful, the most - in some ways, the most cerebral of actors, when he walks into his house and realizes that somebody's inside, he holds a pistol in his hands, and he suddenly sort of completely changed. He obviously thought he was James Bond for a minute, and it's quite (unintelligible). (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) IRVIN: I just said, calm down, calm down. Stop that. Put it away.

Not so keen, you know. But it's interesting that as soon as he had it in his fist, he was transformed by this weapon. I always remember thinking, gosh, you know, we're all boys at heart, aren't we really? CONAN: It is Alec- - and you mentioned his play with the gun. He did more cleaning his glasses than any actor I have ever seen in my life. IRVIN: Yes, with the tip of his tie. CONAN: Yes. IRVIN: Which is a - that's why it works so well, yes. That's - looking back through his - holding his spectacles up, almost like a magnifying glass with this great owl looking into them, you know, penetrating - this penetrating examination of his victims. Wonderful stuff - wonderful, wonderful. He was a master, master, master in terms of his technique. It was amazing. I mean, I've never worked with an actor who, apart from Melvin Douglas, who had the same command and control and concentration - absolutely brilliant. CONAN: We have - in fact, we've asked for calls. And a surprise to us, a wonderful former colleague of ours, Anne Garrels is calling.

Annie, how are you? ANNE GARRELS: I'm very well, and I have a great "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" story. CONAN: Go ahead. GARRELS: Well, I was an ABC correspondent in the late '70s, '80s when the first BBC series came out. And I was the only one in town with a VCR. It was the old three-quarter inch. Nobody - it was way before VHS, and whatever. And I got the series, and I watched it in Moscow with the CIA station chief. I knew who he was. He knew I knew, but we never actually said that - and a bunch of Russians. And, of course, we were sitting there watching it. And, of course, we knew the KGB was listening in to the apartment. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) GARRELS: And they knew we knew, they knew we knew, and it was a hilarious moment. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) CONAN: Now - so that's how they first got the audio track of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." GARRELS: Well, we had the video.

CONAN: Yes. Now, you have the video. They got the audio by listening into you. GARRELS: They got the audio for the first time - or maybe not. CONAN: Those were the days, Annie. We remember when the person the CIA believed to be the KGB chief in Washington used to be regularly issued the license plate 007. GARRELS: Exactly. And, of course, subsequently, I was thrown out for being a spy - although, as the Soviets said, a very bad one... (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) GARRELS: ...I regret. CONAN: Annie, it is great to hear from you. GARRELS: Well, I just - I heard this, and it was just, you know, one of those moments in the Cold War which are distant for so many, and present for so many of us. But, I mean, it was one of the best moments I had in Moscow. CONAN: Annie, thanks so much. GARRELS: Thank you, sweetie. Bye.

CONAN: Our old colleague, Anne Garrels, calling in from, I suspect, Northeastern Connecticut, but she'll correct if I'm wrong. In any case, John Irvin, I know John Le Carre always liked your version of this novel as his favorite adaptation of any of his books into television or movies. Did you ever get a chance to talk to him about it? IRVIN: About the - we worked very closely with David Cornwell... CONAN: Yes, his real name. IRVIN: ...and - his real name, yeah. And although we'd - it's interesting. He may not thank me for saying this, but we didn't show him many rushes for about, I think, you know, until we'd been filming for three or four weeks. We then compiled some rushes with Alec, you know, playing Smiley. And he was halfway through "Smiley's People," writing it. And when he saw the rushes, the compilation, he went back and started again and rewrote "Smiley's People" so that Smiley was much closer to Guinness' persona. It was fascinating. So I know that - Alec and I became very close. Alec was introduced to the head of MI6 by David.

And I knew after that meeting that he was hooked, because he came back and he said to me, hmm, not quite a gentleman: suede shoes, blue suit, very trunky cufflinks. He didn't like the cufflinks. So I knew - once an actor starts talking about his costume or his - you know, I knew that he was hooked. It took - I had to work him for about a month, two months, almost, I think, actually, looking in retrospect, to persuade him to come aboard, because it was a year's work. It was a long, long journey. CONAN: Did you have to cancel shooting if the sun came out? (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) IRVIN: Steady. No, we - unfortunately, we had to stop shooting quite often because the crew was in a dispute with the BBC management, so it was (unintelligible). CONAN: As happened often in those years, yes. IRVIN: Yes. It was - we were embroiled in all sorts of industrial action, but I kept shooting, even if it was only for a day. But I thought that Alec would, you know, would be really, you know, disappointed and might walk.

And I know that I told him (unintelligible), which we - you know, and we couldn't film. We weren't allowed to. The shop steward said no, no, no. So I said, you all go home. I was very depressed. And I saw Alec get up to the telephone outside the dining room, and I thought, you know, he was, you know, talking to his agent, saying, well, you know, this is ridiculous. It's not working. And he came - and he talked to a waiter, and he sat down. And I was profoundly depressed. I thought, you know, we would have to abandon the whole project. And suddenly, the dining was flooded with waiters bearing trays of champagne. And I said, what on earth is - you know, what's going on? Hardly a time for celebration. And he said, no, no, John. You look so depressed. I thought you needed cheering up. So I bought you some champagne. And, of course, he stayed to the end. He was an extraordinary a generous man and, you know, obviously, a master. But he was very thoughtful. CONAN: Fantastic performance you got from him.

John Irvin, congratulations on the renewed interest in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." IRVIN: Thank you. CONAN: And I know you're also now working on a World War II story, "Monte Cassino," due out next year. So good luck with that. IRVIN: Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure. CONAN: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," the Alec Guinness version is available on DVD from Acorn Media, the new - excuse me - the new movie version starring Gary Oldman is out on screens, I guess, just about everywhere. John Irvin joined us today from BBC in London. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Question: What was the name of the character played by Alec Guinness in the TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?
Answer: GEORGE SMILEY