FILMMAKERS SENSED THAT KOREA WOULD HAVE LIMITED APPEAL. THE landscape was too hostile for anything but battle. Romance at the front might have been possible with Clark Gable and Lana Turner in Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942) and Homecoming (1948), but Bogart and Allyson had a difficult time striking sparks in a hospital tent in Battle Circus. Korea was a man’s war, and Hollywood knew it. The women must wait until Johnny comes marching home, no matter what shape he’s in. Europe was more fertile ground, both in front of and behind the Iron Curtain.
Cold War melodrama made the World War II espionage film look like an early version of Windows—functioning, but in need of an upgrade. There would still be movies with an imperiled heroine awaiting rescue by a knight in a trench coat—or, like Clark Gable in Never Let Me Go, in a bathing suit; reporters risking their lives for a scoop; and patriots doing the same, even at the expense of their families (Assignment, Paris). It was the people’s war all over again. This time the people behind the Iron Curtain were the oppressed, and the communists were the oppressors. No longer were women tied to a flagpole and lashed like Bonita Granville in Hitler’s Children (1942), or men bound to a chair and beaten like James Cagney in 13 Rue Madeleine (1946). Communists kidnap and blackmail (The Man Between). They excel at brainwashing, leaving Dana Andrews (Assignment, Paris) in such a somnambulistic state that one wonders if even sexy Marta Toren can revive his old romantic self.
Cold War Europe was made for melodrama: shadowy figures in the night; gothic-style embassies; posh hotels; Old World restaurants with the observed and the observers; women dressed by Jean Louis; and men in tailored suits and Windsor-knotted ties. The communists were square-faced men in suits that looked like regulation attire from a people’s republic, made especially for barrel-chested bureaucrats. The women from Eastern Europe looked bargain basement drab; those from the West were stylish, sporting the New Look, with its tapered waist and long skirts.
Noir had caught up with the Cold War. The streets were coal black like the night—but the kind of night that augured ill. There were too many blind alleys, too many menacing corners. Europe was like a rogue planet in an alternate universe. Paris was recognizable, but it was no longer the city of light, but the city of darkness. And Budapest was no longer a city where lonely hearts find love, however circuitously, as they did in The Shop around the Corner (1940). Instead it was a city in which American reporters are jailed and disappear, or are sentenced to death on a trumped up charge of espionage.
Assignment, Paris (1952) is set in both cities. Dana Andrews plays a danger-defying reporter assigned to the Paris office of the Herald Tribune, where, to his delight, the glamorous Marta Toren also works. Toren is following a lead about a proposed alliance between Hungary and Yugoslavia against Russia, one that would radically alter the configuration of the Soviet bloc. The alliance was, in Hitchcock’s language, the MacGuffin. All that was missing was proof of an alleged meeting between Hungary’s prime minister and Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito.
Such an alliance was not implausible. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, preferring his own form of communism to the inflexible Soviet model. Tito was too independent for Stalin, who considered the Yugoslav leader a maverick and an ingrate. Tito refused to credit the Russians for saving his country from the Nazis, knowing that his partisans deserved recognition, despite the atrocities they committed. (The Russians did their share, especially after they entered Berlin in 1945.) Hungary had witnessed the effects of enforced imposition of the Soviet model: purges, torture, inferior housing, low wages, food rationing. The country was ripe for rebellion. Resentment of Soviet rule erupted in fall 1956 with a short-lived Hungarian revolution. It is tempting to imagine Tito’s capitalizing on Hungary’s discontent after he parted ways with Stalin. There is no proof that he did, but speculation often makes better copy than fact.
Assignment, Paris has one of the most unsettling dénouements in Cold War melodrama. Andrews accepts an assignment in Budapest, where, like his predecessor, he is accused of espionage. During his taped interrogation, he repeats, “I am not going to say I came here to act as a spy.” The first part of the statement is erased, turning it into a confession: “I came here to act as a spy.” The communists will exchange the reporter for a Herald Tribune employee, a former member of the Hungarian resistance who has unearthed documents pointing to a Hungary-Yugoslavia federation. This makes for a painful ending, with the Hungarian willing to sacrifice his life for an American. At least the communists got a man with his senses intact. Andrews, looking as if he had been mesmerized, keeps repeating, “I came here to act as a spy.” As he is bundled into a car with Toren, his editor (George Sanders), mutters, “He’ll be all right.” Possibly, after deprogramming. Regardless, it is a morally perplexing ending. The ill-fated Hungarian is the father of two children from whom he will be separated permanently. He was helping an American reporter expose a covert union between two Soviet bloc countries. Is this a case of “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13)? Sadly, yes. This is the Cold War; the friend is an American, the sacrificial victim a Hungarian. Since both are anti-communists, does one form of anti-communism take precedence over the other? Or, more specifically, is an American’s life more valuable than a Hungarian’s? A voice over coda—“A story out of the headlines of today, out of the headlines of tomorrow”—comes on so quickly that it is easy to forget there is no resolution. The Hungarian will either be executed or sent to a gulag. Perhaps the reporter will work again, but never in Budapest. But neither man will ever be the same. And what was it all for? A scoop that would expose the cracks in the Iron Curtain?
In Diplomatic Courier (1952), released the same year, the former Yugoslavia is still an irritant to Moscow. By spring 1948, Stalin had determined that Tito must die, but assassination attempts proved futile. Tito informed Stalin that if the dictator sends any more assassins, he would retaliate, warning that he would not have to send a second hit man. Such was the historical background of Diplomatic Courier, which imagined a Kremlin, exasperated by Tito’s socialist reforms, planning an invasion of Yugoslavia, supposedly in April 1950. The screenwriters, Casey Robinson and Liam O’Brien, had done their homework, but the date was actually spring 1949. Cold War movies were often inspired by the Soviet Union’s latest muscle flexing, especially when one of its satellites fancied itself a planet. Such was Yugoslavia after World War II. Marshal Tito, flush after his Partisans’ victories, cast his eyes on neighboring Trieste, a strategic seaport in northeastern Italy. Tito was behaving like a junior-league Stalin, empire building with less grandiosity and more benevolence. It would be Titoism, not Stalinism.
After the State Department intercepts a message warning of a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia, a neophyte in the diplomatic corps (Tyrone Power) is dispatched to Salzburg to make contact with the agent in possession of the secret plan, code name Semper. This is the courier’s introduction to the first principle of espionage: Nobody is what he or she appears to be. A widow in mink (Patricia Neal) is in league with the Soviets. The woman who appears to be a Soviet spy (Hildegarde Neff) is a double agent—more on the side of the Americans than the Russians—so that she and the courier can find romance in the shadows of Trieste.
The only sympathetic character in the film is the double agent, who has to play both sides of a dangerous game. Her motives may be selfish (she wants a visa to emigrate to America), but her worth is measured by her present status. Alive, she is useful; dead, she is worthless. The courier’s life is what matters. And what takes precedence over his is the invasion plan: a piece of microfilm inserted in a watch. The double agent has served America well, but if she is caught, “[S]he’s a casualty of the Cold War.”
Except for James Bond movies, the romance of espionage is a myth. It is an ugly business where protection can cease at any moment, after which you fend for yourself when your usefulness has been exhausted. There is a deep strain of cynicism in Diplomatic Courier, especially when the double agent proves to be as pragmatic as her recruiter. She will offer the microfilm to anyone, American or Soviet, who will guarantee her a visa. With Power and Neff lying on the grass, looking dreamily at each other in the fade out, one suspects that her espionage days are over.
Night People (1954)—the title refers to East Berlin communists who do their dirty deeds at night—is the flip side of Diplomatic Courier. The communists have kidnapped an American GI and are holding him in East Berlin, hoping to exchange him for a German couple in the American sector. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote, directed, and produced Night People, braided the script with so many strands that each unraveling brings a new revelation. A double agent (Anita Bjork), who seems to be working for the Americans—even convincing an army colonel (Gregory Peck) of her loyalty—is really in league with the Soviets. The so-called German couple consists of a British woman and her German husband, who had been blinded by the Nazis because of his complicity in an abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler. Rather than be sent to East Berlin and an unknown fate, the couple takes strychnine. If they die, there can be no exchange. But American doctors can work wonders, even when based in West Berlin.
Once the colonel discovers the agent’s duplicity, he pretends to woo her, reviving their old romance and offering her absinthe, her drink of choice, which he has mixed with sleep-inducing powder. As usually happens in this kind of a film, the colonel drinks the drugged absinthe and needs a stomach pump. Still, the exchange goes through. The Americans get the GI, and the communists get the double agent, reeking of absinthe, wrapped in a blanket, and rolled into a waiting truck on a gurney. And the couple can spend their sunset years without thoughts of suicide.
Night People posed a profound dilemma, which Johnson did not have to resolve, since he steered the film toward a successful resolution. Before that happens, the colonel must determine whether the life of one American is worth the death of a married couple. And when the colonel discovers that the wife is a British subject, he realizes the consequences of such a trade: a court martial and imprisonment. By having the couple attempt suicide, Johnson delays the climax until the “exchange” is accomplished—except that it is now the exchange of a disgraced agent for an American corporal. The irony carries over to the coda, in which a radio announcer reports that the Soviets have returned a corporal (no name is mentioned) to the American sector, signaling further co-operation between the two world powers in the interest of peace, darkening what Milton in The Reason of Church-Government called the “bright countenance of truth.” The truth is that both sides had to save face. The Russians could not admit one of their spies was an absinthe addict, and the Americans could not reveal the nature of the original exchange. There is at least a grain of truth in the announcement: A corporal was released.
The pit of espionage—with its ever-widening circles of agents, counter agents, controllers, and expendables—would even have challenged the imagination of Dante, who fashioned a mathematically exact hell of nine circles, some with subdivisions. Espionage is not that ordered. The circles of deception expand or contract, depending on the number of newcomers and discards. Everyone is expendable, except Control, the grand master of intelligence, who moves his agents around the chessboard of espionage as if they were pawns. In Mary Renault’s novel, The Charioteer, Ralph, who has accepted his homosexuality, explains the gay demimonde to Laurie: “Ours isn’t a horizontal society. It’s a vertical one, Plato, Michelangelo, Sappho, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Socrates if you count the bisexuals—we can all quote the upper crust. But at the bottom . . . believe me, there isn’t any bottom. Never forget it. You’ve no conception, you haven’t a clue, how far down it goes.” The same is true of British intelligence as portrayed in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), based on John le Carré’s bestseller of the same name. Unlike Dante’s hell, here there is no ninth circle. Just as the bottom appears, another circle opens, and the descent continues. The hell of espionage is a netherworld without poetry. There are no symbolic beasts or metaphorical punishments; no Virgil for a guide, no sins or sinners. The only sin is failure, which can mean a transfer, a desk job, dismissal, or death. There are no men in trench coats, no women in slinky dresses. Spies, as Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) explains to Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), a British communist, are “seedy, squalid bastards like me . . . drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, people who stammer, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.” This is a world in which James Bond would not feel at home.
Photographed in bleak monochrome and directed with unflinching realism by Martin Ritt, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold presents a grimly cynical picture of British intelligence. Expediency is all, betrayal is inevitable, and double agents mean double crosses. As Leamas, Richard Burton—his waist thickened and his face rueful—exudes dissipation. Leamas, who had been in charge of intelligence operations in Berlin for nine years, is recalled to London after his best contact—who had supplied him with microfilm of East German intelligence meetings—is killed. Control has worked out an elaborate scenario for Leamas, more dangerous than his previous job. He will supposedly be demoted. Then, after being seen acting unruly in public, he will be briefly imprisoned, then reduced to working for a pittance in a library—all this to attract the attention of East German operatives and convince them he is ripe for defection. The ruse is only clarified at the end of the film. Until then, we believe Leamas has turned into a drunken bully, intimidating and then pummeling a grocer. But what does a trouncing matter to Control, who says matter-of-factly, “We do disagreeable things. . . . We have to live without sympathy.”
Control’s scheme is even more perverse. He informs Leamas that Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck), an ex-Nazi and now a communist, is a double agent and must be killed—preferably by his subordinate, Fiedler (Oscar Werner), a Jew and a loyal communist. The truth is that Control wants Fiedler killed so Mundt can continue working for the British. A principled Fiedler is a liability; a ruthless Mundt is an asset.
The ending is a Liebestod, stark and unorchestrated. Leamas has fallen in love with Nan, who sees communism as the only hope for world disarmament and universal brotherhood. Just when it seems that they are doomed to be executed, Mundt arranges their escape. They are to drive to the Berlin Wall, which they will be allowed to climb and return to the West. When Leamas has almost reached the top, pulling Nan up after him, a shot rings out. Nan falls to the ground. Control only wants Leamas. A guard shouts, “Go back to your own side!” Leamas then realizes that he has been manipulated by the grand puppeteer, who cuts the strings of his marionettes when their performing days are over. Looking down at Nan’s body, he begins his descent, leaving the guard no other choice but to kill him. Ritt resisted the temptation to have the lovers’ hands touch in death. Leamas and Nan lie alongside each other in front of the most potent and tragic symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall.