I enjoy stories about intelligent people solving problems, hence my love for detective and espionage dramas, elements of which also spill over into the best superhero and science fiction. For instance, my favorite fictional character is Sherlock Holmes, who is not only a detective but does favors for British intelligence in the person of his brother Mycroft, plays superhero to Professor Moriarty’s supervillain, and of course employs science, both real and fictional.
I have always loved James Bond movies, but more for the action and spectacle than for the displays of intelligence work.
To read this, get behind our Paywall
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
Related
-
Think about It: Michael Nehls’ The Indoctrinated Brain, Part 2
-
Think about It: Michael Nehls’ The Indoctrinated Brain, Part 1
-
Looking for Anne and Finding Meyer, a Follow-Up
-
The Origins of Western Philosophy: Diogenes Laertius
-
Nowej Prawicy przeciw Starej Prawicy, Rozdział 6: Znaczenie filozofii dla zmiany politycznej
-
Elizabeth Dilling on the Evil of the Talmud
-
Wholesome Escapism: The BBC Farm Series
-
What You Need to Know about the German New Right: An Interview with Martin Lichtmesz
30 comments
I enjoyed the Gary Oldman version. Thanks for all the background. Nice review.
I think you’d love the Guinness one, then.
I will check it out. He was great as Fagin.
I recommend the Guinness one, too.
Great review and I agree wholeheartedly. I really hope they make The Honourable Schoolboy into a film or series. Or should I say I wish they had already: they’d probably set it in Lagos or Calcutta these days.
Moved comment down as I did not mean it as a reply to Phil_Regular
A worthy Smiley adaptation is Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (1966), based on le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead (1961). James Mason plays Smiley (named Charles Dobbs in the movie, as Paramount had acquired film rights to the Smiley character name at the time). I rate it a 4/5. Mason also stars in the very good, anti-Stalinist, Carol Reed spy film The Man Between (1953), which features terrific principal photography in the actual, bombed out, post-war Berlin, and which deploys great noir-lighting effects. I’d also rate this one a 4/5.
Thanks, have not seen either of these.
Good review. The BBC Tinker miniseries is one of my favorite series and book adaptations. Guinness’s fine acting is arguably on the same level as his performance in Bridge over the River Kwai. The series is gloriously White and British, with a dash of pre-war continental European (Esterhase).
I did not know that Ludovici worked for MI6 before the war. Was he purged for ideological reasons or ethnic (Italian) reasons? Or both?
Ludovici was actually a German name, Latinized during the post-Renaissance Latinizing craze. He was purged for being an extreme Rightist, anti-Semite, attendee at the Nuremberg Rallies, etc.
Sarcastic Kök Böri will add here, that Kim Philby was not purged from the SIS in the same times, and even much later Comrade Kim was warned by his colleague Elliott to let hit run away from Beirut.
Thank you for bringing this character to my attention. I will surely buy the book. (When I’ll get around to reading it is not so sure…)
Thanks for a great review. Smiley’s People was one of the first “serious” television I saw at the age of about 14. I rewatched it a few years ago and it was as good as I remembered.
To add to the recommendations, there’s a good film version of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold starring Richard Burton. Smiley makes a small appearance, as does Bernard Lee who went on to play M in the Bond films, this time as a grocer.
Can I also say generally how much I welcome reviews of classic TV and film. I find most of the anti-white diversity propaganda of the last 20 years unwatchable, and recommendations from people like Trevor/Greg who know more than I do are a hugely valuable resource.
Thanks. I will try to do more. There’s almost nothing worth watching in the theaters today.
Almost nothing worth watching? Understatement of the year Greg!
I have not seen a movie in a theatre in ten years. I miss going to the movies. But there is nothing worth seeing anymore.
I miss drive-ins, too.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has perhaps the definitive Control, played by Cyril Cusack.
I like Alexander Knox as Control in the BBC Tinker, Tailor but he’s really ancient there, and I wonder whether that Control mightn’t have been put out to pasture long before. Curious thing about Knox is that he’s North American (Canadian), has played Americans (Woodrow Wilson), Australians (Dr McDonnell to Rosalind Russell’s Sister Kenny, which he also helped script; he and Roz age about 40 years onscreen); and often enough Englishmen, but never put on a shred of any kind of accent or dialect. In Tinker, Tailor you get the idea that Control/Knox comes from an era before people started speaking in funny accents.
Thanks for this, there really hasn’t been anything worth watching for a while now.
Cold War espionage is fascinating. You might enjoy Ben Macintyre’s novel “A Spy Among Friends”.
Kim Philby was a true believer.
“A Spy Among Friends”
That’s not a novel, but a non-fiction book. Very good one.
About Le Carre’, I remember that his first novels, like
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963),
The Looking Glass War (1965),
A Small Town in Germany (1968),
were extremely Germanophobic.
Germanophobic and, as usually goes with it, philo-Semitic. I recall enjoying the Richard Burton film of “Spy Who…” and probably the book at some point, but on a recent re-reading I found it rather distasteful. Apart from continual harping on the poor, poor friendless Jews who dindu nuffin, the whole point of the plot is that Realpolitik requires Burton’s character to be fooled into thinking he’s going to expose an ex-Nazi in the E. Germany govt but actually the plan is to have the whole thing blow up and instead incriminate the innocent and soulful Jewish prosecutor Burton has taken a shine to. As Greg says above, I don’t identify with that “moral dilemma.” I can go along with his “both sides are corrupt” viewpoint (as did Yockey!) but rather than being neutral he always finds a way to promote the Jews.
“I believe the Number 11 bus goes to Hammersmith and that Father Christmas isn’t driving it.” That’s from the novel, I think (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), but it may also be in the movie in a garbled version. What Alec Leamas says when Nan asks him what he believes in, just as she reveals she’s a Commie. When I grew up and went to London I looked for the Hammersmith bus along Kings Road and found that the Number 11 to Hammersmith had long since been replaced by the Number 22.
Then I saw Peter O’Toole on TV giving the “Number 11 bus” line and figured, so maybe it goes back a lot further than leCarré and it’s not meant as a literal direction to Hammersmith?
A Spy Among Friends, the book, is excellent, but I panned the “freely adapted” television series here on C-C. New Year’s Day, I think.
For me, the 1979 Tinker Tailor with Alec Guinness was the masterpiece. The Burlington Files gives a fascinating insight into just how little agents in the field know about what they are doing whether in London or Port au Prince maybe as a prelude to a Haitien equivalent to the Bay of Pigs. Also, remember it’s written by an agent not a professional writer like JleC so don’t expect JleC delicate diction et al.
If you dig into the backgrounds of Pemberton’s People in MI6 you will understand so much more and be rewarded when reading Beyond Enkription. I suggest you read the brief News Articles in TheBurlingtonFiles website dated 31 October 2022, 26 September 2021 and 7 January 2020. One critic described Beyond Enkription as ”up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. He wasn’t that far wrong, indeed arguably spot on.
JleC worked as an SIS case officer, but not long. Before this he was in the Intelligence Corps (Army G-2) and then in Security Service (MI5)
Supposedly because Philby’s defection in January 1963 killed a lot of the SIS networks, leCarré included.
Sorry, but here I am a dissenter. I do not believe that Philby as a Soviet spy did any harm to BRITISH interests. He did it to Americans and to Anti-Communist emigrees from the Eastern block (Ukrainians, Albanians, Latvians, etc.). Maybe his chiefs knew that he was working for the Russians and allowed him to do it. That’s why the British let him go away in Beirut. If he had really did something bad to Britain, he would get 42 years in prison like George Blake (his escape is another story).
In the Soviet intelligence center there was a clever woman Elena Modrzinskaya (ethnic Pole), and she till her death in 1982 was absolutely sure that Philby and the others of the “Cambridge Five” were double agents who remained ultimately loyal to Britain. By the way, the same hypothesis was expressed by the American-Jewish writer Robert Littell in his spy novel “Young Philby.”
Yes – an interesting career and apparently he almost collaborated on The Burlington Files project as noted in the article referred to above.
I highly recommend Trevor Lynch’s books, including this one:
https://counter-currents.com/product/trevor-lynchs-classics-of-right-wing-cinema/
I also would recommend Michael Waller’s book BIG INTEL
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Intel-Heroes-State-Villains/dp/1684513537/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IIM66UWA2CAR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LPhcOWkU35aOpmspf1kDrvtapo7BdRh7NMgoVfizwmhAGKMzxxwQbFXwN49oYqiiGLCDSopexeYOdcT9qxxovg.fVbhQjsQJMc-lSsEGRD1qQWnGawuVfEpbecF_qc894g&dib_tag=se&keywords=big+intel+michael+waller&qid=1714797398&sprefix=big+intel+%2Caps%2C236&sr=8-1
I got the book only yesterday and after immediately started reading I enjoy it very much. Here you find everything – Bolshevik influence, Political correctness, Frankfurter Schule, Leftist subversion of America, and also intelligence and counterintelligence.
I found some factical errors in the book, but after reading of first 10 chapters I can surely say that the Waller’s book is good.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.