Tinker, Tailor: why I watch films

Some people go for fast-moving plots and action - car chases, explosions, shoot-outs - not me. I prefer my cinema reflective, well acted and well scripted. Film-going is not just a way of passing an hour and half. It's about usefully increasing the sum of my experience, though in a vicarious manner (indeed, like reading a good book). A good film, then, is one to which I'll be coming back time and time again, quoting quotes from it, and referring to in my writing.

Watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Gary Oldman in the role of George Smiley was a real pleasure; though spy films are not my genre, this film is deeply cerebral with an obsessive focus on accuracy. The period - one which I remember well as a teenager - is beautifully captured; clothes, cars, props (Harp lager, Trebor mints) - but most of all the dingy grandeur of early '70s London.

The moral equivalence between communism and the west seeps out now and then (particularly shocking was the scene of the Christmas party at which the top British secret intelligence service staff were drunkenly singing the Soviet national anthem). By the 1980s, with Reagan having defined the Cold War as one against an Evil Empire, one which 'we must win and they must lose', musings such as 'they're just like us' or 'we're just as bad as them' would have been quite, quite treasonable. Despite the ambiguity (the Soviets were on our side during the 'real' war) there was an awareness that the activities of the West's spies was aimed at preventing World War III.

Nicely portrayed was the analogue-era equipment of spying - film cameras and encrypted telex machines - and everything was on paper, filed in rows upon rows of shelving occupying floors upon floors of office space - stuff that today would fit into a handful of domestic computers. And manual security systems; guards and dockets, turnstiles, no swipe-cards or biometric ID checks.

Use of music to create the right period was neatly, subtly done. Choosing Hurricane Smith's 1971 hit Don't Let It Die - a masterstroke. A song that reached No. 2 in the UK pop charts that summer, was played everywhere - and then promptly forgotten for four decades. And the scene where Peter Guillam is stealing the log book, and Mendel is at the car mechanics ready to make a distracting phone call. On Radio 2 (presumably!) we hear a request for George Formby's Mr Wu's A Windowcleaner Now. The 1939 novelty song in the music hall tradition, at that time the film was set* three and half decades old, is still a hit with the mechanics (tapping their spanners) and the eavesdropping stenographer singing along as she transcribes the intercepted phone call. The way it fits in with the suspense - will Guillam be discovered - makes the scene a great one.

The plot hangs together very well; despite being completely new to John Le Carre and the spy genre, I had no problem following the twists and turns of the story line, and I was genuinely surprised by the ending(s). But given the lukewarm reviews in the Daily Mail and Daily Express I can see that many film goers would prefer to see Tom Cruise being propelled through the air in the wake of a giant fireball while waving his arms and legs.

More films like Tinker, Tailor for me, please!

* 'the film was set'. How do you say that concisely in Polish - as in 'the film is set in 1970s London'?

This time four years ago:
Trundling Tamara