Study Guide for Week 14

Assigned Document

Martin Ritt (director). The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965; 112 minutes), based closely on the novel of the same name by John Le Carré (1963).

Please note: Spy will be screened in Benson Auditorium at 7 pm on Sunday, April 24th. It can also be screened, in much diminished quality, through Sakai; if you have trouble with Sakai, please email the head of Pitzer AV, Victor Milhon-Martin. But be there in the Benson if you can be.

John Le Carré died in December of last year; here is an obit about him. And here is an obit about the director, Martin Ritt, who died in 1990; and here is some information about the composer of the film’s music, Sol Kaplan, who also died in 1990.

In a review of the movie The Spy Who Came in From the Cold at the time it was released in 1965, NY Times’s critic Bosley Crowther wrote: “…this may well be a difficult and confusing film. Like…real life, it is full of elusive talk. It is full of involved explanations, cryptic references and droppings of names you must remember in order to follow the plot. There is very little concrete action in it—pistol-pulling, chases and such. To keep up with what is happening, you have to listen. Hard” (Crowther 1965).

Keep this advice—Listen. Hard.—in mind as you watch the movie.

Questions

1. In our discussions of political nationalism, we have noted that the specific “people” or “collective self” that persons identify with is not a given, but is a contingent and historical phenomena and sometimes a shifting and also, sometimes, a plural, not a singular, matter. Listening hard to the movie, what do you find is the largest or most encompassing “collective self” that “Control” and those on his “side” identify with? (Listen hard, for example, to the dialogue in the first scene in which Control appears.)

2. In the second scene in which the Control appears, this character says, “There is a man called Fiedler. . . Fiedler is a Jew of course and Mundt is quite the other thing…” What is indicated here by “quite the other thing”?

3. In this movie and in real life, many things give an indication of an event’s or scene’s location in historical time. For example: if a cell phone small enough to fit into a pant pocket appears in a film, the story is taking place some time in the last 25 or so years—unless the director made an anachronistic error. Assuming there are no anachronistic errors in this film (and there aren’t any), identify three things in it that bespeak the story’s location in time. For each one, briefly explain what you know, or can easily find out, about the (span of) time the selected thing bespeaks. Your three things must be from three different scenes in the movie.

4a. Who fires the final gun shots in this movie? What else has this person done?

4b. What is the final spoken line in this movie?

Be prepared to discuss the following three questions, but you are not asked to write up your answers to them.

A. As depicted in this film, how democratic is “the West”? And how democratic is “the East?”

B. In the first scene in which we see Control, he says: “Our work, as I understand it, is based on the single assumption that the West is never going to be the aggressor.” Is that single assumption true historically? How is this assumption present in media representations and public responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

C. At the time the film was made, and at the time the film depicts, homosexuality was highly invisible, highly closeted, and viciously stigmatized in the US and Britain. In what scenes and in what ways does the film register and put on screen the prevalent social orientation toward homosexuality? Can you discern a position or perspective the movie takes on homosexuality? If so, what is it?