Snyder Shrugged: The Disturbing Politics of the Cape and Cowl

Henry Cavill as Superman in Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I recently learned that Zack Snyder, director of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is intending on pursuing a remake of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead once he’s done with all this comic book nonsense. In a recent interview for The Hollywood Reporter, he says:

"I have been working on The Fountainhead. I've always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something."

This revelation – that Snyder, director of highly politicized comic-book films like his adaptations of Frank Miller’s 300 (2006) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (2009), was an admirer of Ayn Rand’s work – surprised very few people. This little tidbit was, in fact, the final piece of a puzzle we’ve collectively been trying to solve for a decade now: the key to understanding Snyder’s distinctly… personal approach to filmmaking.

A Clearly Marked Trail: The First Episode of The Path

Michelle Monaghan and Aaron Paul in The Path.

“In the beginning, I sort of just made up stuff,” said The Path’s showrunner, Jessica Goldberg, in a Decider.com interview about the invention of the TV show’s fictionalized religion, Meyerism. A hodgepodge of various religions and belief systems, Meyerism is at the heart of the drama in the Goldberg’s first television series which launched Wednesday April 6th on Hulu. While American Hulu subscribers can take in all 10 episodes of The Path right away, here in Canada we’re forced to walk the sacred ancient path of weekly installments. The series’ pilot, “What the Fire Throws,” aired last Thursday April 7th on Showcase and will be followed by tonight’s second episode titled, “The Era of the Ladder.” While the pilot was amusing enough, Goldberg’s aforementioned approach to screenwriting shows in this largely predictable first episode.

Dori Freeman's Debut Album: Beautiful and Honest

With so much music being released, it’s refreshing to hear someone truly stand out from the crowded world. Dori Freeman, a new singer-songwriter from Virginia, has recently released her self-titled debut album on Free Dirt Records – and I can’t enough of it. Ten tracks adorn the record that is a cross between the subtle sounds of Peggy Lee and the edgy timbre of Patsy Cline, but instead of imitation we have an album of Chamber Country: quiet, soft and introspective but still full of engaging stories and a deep understanding of its musical roots.

Freeman was born in Galax, Virginia, a town in the Appalachian Mountains. Her extended family has a rich association with mountain music, so much so that the Freemans own a shop along the state heritage trail, aka Crocked Road, where travellers seek out genuine original music from Appalachia. It’s also far away from the horrible commercial sounds of “new country” which percolate out of Nashville. Even though she’s 24 years of age, you can hear the ghosts of American music past delighting on every note she sings. Her voice and her thoughtful song writing impressed Teddy Thompson so much he agreed to produce her first record without hesitation, “I didn’t really do anything other than put a microphone in front of her,” he told No Depression magazine. Thompson also sings on three tracks – “Where I Stood”, “Any Wonder” and “A Song for Paul” – which stand out for their harmonies and silky instrumentation.

It’s Just Something He Does: Midnight Special

Michael Shannon, with Jaeden Lieberher, in Midnight Special. (Photo: Ben Rothstein)

We’re all aware of the writer’s maxim that says it’s a terrible faux-pas to have characters telling each other things they already know, as a means of getting this information to the audience. Hollywood seems to employ this clumsy tactic too often, as if paranoid that audiences will stand up and walk out if plot details and character motivations – especially in a genre film context, where weird shit happens all the time – aren’t spoon-fed explicitly to them. Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) seems to have crafted Midnight Special as a fierce rebellion against this dumbing-down of popular cinema. This is a science fiction story about a father and son that traffics in emotion, not exposition, and it’s all the richer for it.

Not Buying It: Blackbird and The Humans

Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in David Harrower's Blackbird. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

In David Harrower’s Blackbird, which has opened on Broadway in a new revival, Una, a young woman in her twenties, tracks down Ray, with whom she had an affair when she was twelve and he was forty. Fifteen years have passed; he is working in another city, under another name, having reconstituted his life after spending three and a half years in prison. Their end-of-the-workday conversation in the garbage-strewn staff break room of the company where he works comprises almost the entire play (which runs approximately an hour and a half, without intermission). Harrower’s Scottish, and the play premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 before opening in the West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, and on Broadway in 2007, with Jeff Daniels as Ray and Alison Pill as Una. I saw the original New York production, and except for Daniels’ gripping portrayal of Ray I didn’t care for it. It seemed to me to be an unnuanced depiction of pedophilia with a heroine whose justified fury at the adult man who slept with her when she was on the cusp of adolescence represents the second way in which he’s managed to wreck her existence: he can go on with his life but she can’t get over what he did to her. That is, it felt like a familiar kind of social problem play that takes a stand no one could possibly dispute – a drama that flatters the audience for its right-mindedness.

Tensions between History and Film: Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo.

Before a scene is shot, a screenplay is necessary. The screenwriter may draw upon his own imagination as well as other source material, as does John McNamara in Trumbo. But therein also lies a major problem: McNamara conveys skewed or caricatured portraits of gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, actors John Wayne and Edgar G. Robinson, but also relies substantially on Bruce Cook’s hagiographic 1977 biography Trumbo (reissued in 2015), a source that the screenwriter acknowledges having read ten times. Cook did extensive interviews, including with Dalton Trumbo himself, to write primarily about his personal life and professional career as Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter before the blacklist. During those repressive times, he peddled scripts to small independent companies and then used a “front” who pretended to be the writer. Two of his scripts, for which he could not be credited, won Oscars.

Unfortunately, Dalton Trumbo’s politics is given short shrift in Cook’s biography, a major flaw that is reflected in the film, given that Trumbo’s politics is the driving force behind making the film. As a result, Jay Roach has directed a simplistic, superficial and curiously apolitical biopic – notwithstanding a few heated exchanges about labour strikes in the film industry and Trumbo handing out leaflets – that drains the historical setting from 1946 until the early 1960s of any real context. I say curious because his earlier effort, Game Change, a television movie about John McCain’s disastrous decision to choose Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate, is an insightful political film and vastly superior to this mediocre and occasionally embarrassing, puerile production. The blacklist that deprived hundreds of Hollywood personalities of their jobs polarized Americans. Roach’s Trumbo has replicated that polarization – some critics calling it a “thoughtful account” and a “sobering true event” while others have dismissed it as a “whitewash.” Unfortunately, I must side with the latter assessment, but for different reasons.

Fearless Satire: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

(Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot details that The Manchurian Candidate keeps hidden until quite late in the narrative. Though they are quite famous, if you don’t know them you might prefer to see the movie first and encounter the revelations with all the suspense and surprise that the 1962 audience would have experienced.)

Political conspiracy thrillers flourished during the early days of the Cold War and especially during the Korean War. Generally their heroes were pure-hearted Federal agents who succeeded in stemming the insidious behavior of Communist infiltrators, icy devils with no more dimensions than the Nazis bad guys Hollywood had featured just a few years earlier. The exception was Leo McCarey’s notorious and distasteful 1952 My Son John, in which the Commie is a young American man (Robert Walker) who comes home to give the commencement speech at his old high school and alarms his mother (Helen Hayes) by mocking his parents’ patriotism and refusing to attend church with them. He is also clearly gay, though the movie doesn’t say so explicitly; you deduce it from the flourishes in Walker’s performance, which are recycled from the truly splendid one he gave the year before in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The idea seems to be some debased version of the Renaissance notion about the clustering of vices in a corrupted personality. In the great Jacobean tragedy The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, when the husband of the protagonist realizes she’s a murderess and her partner in crime calls her a whore, the husband replies, “It could not choose but follow.” More specifically in My Son John, the un-American elements in John’s behavior – cynicism, atheism, homosexuality – all point to his being under the influence of a foreign power.

Estranged: Schitt's Creek and Baskets

Catherine O’Hara, Annie Murphy, Eugene Levy, and Daniel Levy in Schitt's Creek.

Schitt’s Creek (stylized as Schitt$ Creek), a CBC sitcom airing in the U.S. on the Pop network, is in its second season; Baskets, on FX, has just ended its first. Both are comedies of estrangement centering on dysfunctional families, and both show a desire to dig – patiently, obliquely, as if with a jailhouse spoon – toward the human parts of obtuse or abrasive characters. Despite being resistant to quick affinity or effortless love, each has been renewed for another year. That’s a fine thing: there are audiences out here for them, and everyone deserves a chance to find each other.

Neglected Gem # 91 – Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999)

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who hadn’t seen her mother in seven years. She was forced to dress in iron clothes and was told, ‘When you wear out these clothes, you can go back to your mother.’”

Contrary to this line from the film, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is neither about iron clothes nor mothers – at least, not literally anyway. This 1999 animated feature takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood (here identified, apropos of the setting, as the Brothers Grimm’s "Rotkäppchen") and applies its motifs and simple morality to a winding tale of political allegiances in an alternate-history version of Japan. A brief intro before the opening title card sets the stage for us. It’s the 1950s; Japan was taken over by Nazi Germany in the wake of WWII and is now struggling to maintain political stability as the occupying German troops leave the country after a decade of oppression. The people rebel against their fledgling government. Protests are frequent and often violent, requiring special police forces and paramilitary groups to manage to the chaos. Enter the iconic, gas-mask wearing, red-eyed Kerberos Panzer Cops, an elite anti-terror unit charged with keeping the peace at all costs. In Jin-Roh’s Japan, the Kerberos Cops are as controversial as they are deadly and presently at risk of being disbanded.

The Man Who Talked Too Much: Garry Shandling and The Larry Sanders Show

Garry Shandling with Sharon Stone on The Larry Sanders Show in 1994. (Photo courtesy of HBO)

Johnny Carson’s annual “anniversary” specials were usually clip shows that featured only Johnny, his faithful sidekicks, the announcer Ed McMahon and bandleader Doc Severinsen, and their memories. But in 1988, Carson shook up the formula a little by making room for three guest comedians, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Garry Shandling. Over the course of the evening, each of them came out individually to perform and pay tribute to their host, and as Dave, Jay, and Garry prepared to take his leave, Carson would lean in close to assure each of them that, confidentially, he was Johnny’s favorite. It was an inside joke that everyone in the national television audience was in on. Letterman (b. 1947), Leno (b. 1950), and Shandling (b. 1949) had all filled in for Carson as guest hosts of The Tonight Show, and were seen as potential heirs to his throne whenever the great man deigned to retire. (Letterman, who had been hosting his own late, late night show in the slot following Carson’s since 1982, made his Tonight Show debut in 1978 and guest-hosted for the first time in 1979.) When Carson finally stepped down in 1992 and NBC snubbed Letterman by choosing Leno as their new late night masthead, it set off a battle to define the TV face of the aging Baby Boomer generation that mirrored the generational political fight to define true Boomer legacy that began that same year, when Bill Clinton handed George W. Bush’s dad his pipe and slippers, along with some pamphlets suggesting how to make the most of one’s golden years. (The late-night wars came to an end last year, when Letterman joined Leno in retirement. The political Boomer wars are still ongoing, though the Clinton-Bush feud took a hit earlier this year, when Jeb!’s silver rocket to the stars quietly imploded on the launch pad.)
 
Shandling, who died last week of a massive heart attack, first appeared on the Carson show as an unknown standup in March 1981, and would go on to guest host seven times in 1986 and 1987. There’s a fluky little moment in his debut appearance that, in hindsight, has the weight of prophecy. After Carson has called him out, saying that it’s an auspicious night for a young comedian to be on the show because the studio audience is in such a receptive mood, Shandling does his act and backs towards the wings, acknowledging the crowd’s applause. The camera cuts to Carson, who appears to be trying to wave Shandling over to join him at his desk. In 1981, anyone who was enough of a show business insider to obtain a copy of TV Guide knew that it was the ultimate dream of any comedian to receive an unscheduled invitation from Carson to sit down and chat after doing his act for the first time on The Tonight Show; comedians whose names no one remembers now could often be seen ending their sets by casting a hopeful look in Carson’s direction, just in case he has a flare in each hand and is eagerly trying to guide them in to sit on his lap.

DC’s Doomsday – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I felt so, so bad for the five- or six-year-old boy sitting with his family in the row ahead of me for my screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He got up from his seat several times and capered about through the aisle, barely paying attention to the noise blaring around him, and when he did, asking pointed and, I thought, very excellent questions like, “Who is that?” and “Mommy, why does Batman hate Superman?” His parents shushed him each time, but I wanted to high-five the poor kid. What a tragedy it is that these people brought him to this film, thinking he would have a fun time watching his heroes on the big screen. What cruelty for Zack Snyder and Warner Bros to have done what they did to these characters, and by extension, to him. When Batman v Superman isn’t a violent, grim, tedious slog, it’s an unforgivable corruption of some of comicdom’s most beloved characters, who are twisted to serve a ten-year marketing plan and Snyder’s galaxy-sized ego. It’s one of, if not the single most unpleasant and incoherent comic book movies ever made. And all I can do for that kid is be grateful that the Marvel movies and shows are still there to remind him how this shit is supposed to be done.

New Work from Steve Martin and Kenneth Lonergan

Paul Alexander Nolan and Carmen Cusack in Bright Star, by Steve Martin & Edie Bricknell. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The Renaissance man Steve Martin reinvents himself again as co-composer (with lyricist Edie Brickell) and book writer of the new bluegrass musical Bright Star, which has opened in New York after a premiere production at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. The show continues Martin’s collaboration with Brickell, which began with the 2013 studio album Love Has Come for You. (A couple of the songs from Bright Star appear on that collection; roughly half of their 2015 album, So Familiar, consists of take-aways from the show.)

Steve Martin’s fans are sure to consider Bright Star an oddity: it does contain some humor but with one significant exception – one of the key dramatic scenes, a revelatory flashback, transpires while one of the ancillary characters is wading in a pond, hunting frogs for dinner – it’s surprisingly lacking in his trademark irony. The musical, set in North Carolina during two time periods (the mid-1920s and the era following the Second World War), tells the stories of a returning soldier in his early twenties, Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), who’s trying to become a fiction writer and, two decades earlier, the travails of Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), the woman who ends up mentoring him at an Asheville literary journal. As a young woman, Alice is a renegade in a strict Christian farm town who becomes involved with a rich boy, Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Paul Alexander Nolan), over the objections of his father, the mayor (Michael Mulheren). Though there’s considerable freshness in the storytelling in the first act, the plot itself, which Martin and Brickell devised together, is a melodrama with depressingly familiar tropes. When one character tells another late in act two, just before unearthing the secret of the plot, “I knew this day would come,” I muttered under my breath, “So did I.”

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVII

It's not a surprising irony in the late Sixties and early Seventies, just as many Americans were feeling like unwitting spiritual exiles and no longer wishing to be part of their own country, that many movie-makers began impassioned quests to find it. The results could be as powerfully masochistic as Easy Rider (1969) with its strain of pop religiosity which featured its hippie heroes romantically doomed to crucifixion by the power structure. The outcome could be as ambivalent as John Schlesinger's 1969 Midnight Cowboy (which loved its lost heroes but strangely shared no empathy for the country that produced them). The sojourn could also have the operatic sweep and depth of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) which embraced the tidal pull of the nation along with the very elements that would come to corrupt it. Regardless of the quality of films – from Alice's Restaurant to Nashville – movies were committed to taking the pulse of a country in decline and in distress. 

In the epic striving of Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), recently released by the Criterion Collection in their full Swedish versions and immaculately restored on Blu-ray, the director takes in America as an untested promise, or a fever dream that brings forth deliverance. Based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic four-volume novels which account the long journey of Swedish farming families to settlements in Minnesota in 1850, Troell captures in a largely naturalistic style for over six hours both the cost and renewal of that promise without embellishing the hopes of those making the quest, or romanticizing the claims of the new land (which the farmers discover is stolen land from the Sioux). Troell, who shoots, edits and directs his own movies, removes our awareness of film language as if the camera were a portal in which to comprehend a lost period of realism. When he focuses on the life and marriage of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), featuring two actors whose iconic definitions through their work with Ingmar Bergman couldn't be more recognizable, Troell clears a path for both performers to shed that skin and to embellish their work with fresh character etchings. Those nuances not only reveal how the arduous journey tests that marriage, but also the many ways it fulfills it. The marriage between the settlers and their environment, where nature is both unforgiving and inviting, is equally a test of endurance and purpose. That Jan Troell has been an invisible giant on the cinematic landscape – despite the enduring depth of later works like Flight of the Eagle (1982), Hamsun (1996), As White as in Snow (2001) and Everlasting Moments (2008) – may well be due to his gift of letting the story dictate the style rather than imposing his style on it.

Podcast: Interview with Peter Weller (1987)

Peter Weller in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. 

In 1987, one of those interviews was with actor Peter Weller who was in Toronto promoting his starring role in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop. The movie would go on to become one of the highest grossing and best reviewed films of that year, with Roger Ebert specifically praising Weller for the "impressive job of creating sympathy for his character" despite spending most of the film concealed under makeup and prosthetics.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Peter Weller as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

The Carmichael Show: Topical, Traditional, and Terribly Fun

Tiffany Hagdish, Jerrod Carmichael and Amber Stevens West in The Carmichael Show. (Photo: Ben Cohen/NBC)

At the end of last summer, NBC gave us a gift: six episodes of a sitcom based on the life and comedy of comedian Jerrod Carmichael. The entire short first season of The Carmichael Show was burned off in a blink-and-you-miss-it three weeks, two episodes at a time – normally an indicator of pre-broadcast cancellation. That The Carmichael Show was so refreshingly bold and charming just seemed to make its fate all the more inevitable. And so, when the comedy was renewed by the network just a week after its run ended, I was as surprised as I was delighted. Earlier this month, The Carmichael Show returned to NBC with its 13-episode second season, and now, four episodes in, it should top your list of "the best network shows you probably aren't watching."

J’y Gagne: Mark Osborne’s Le Petit Prince

There was a time – only a month ago, in fact! – when I thought Le Petit Prince was never coming out. In December 2014, I’d seen the trailer for Mark Osborne’s animated adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s book and was dazzled by the animation set to a Lily Allen cover of Keane’s "Somewhere Only We Know." Months later, a quick Google search informed me that the film had actually been released in France in mid-summer 2015.  And, although the English voices were recorded first, it would be another seven months before the English dub would be available to audiences, though mainly on the festival circuit. Last month, Le Petit Prince opened to a limited theatrical release in Quebec, and two weeks ago (as The Little Prince) the movie finally opened in the rest of Canada. The film had been slated for theatres in the United States as well; however, at the last minute, Paramount dropped Le Petit Prince and distribution rights were acquired by Netflix.

I first read Le Petit Prince in French, in a grade eleven classroom. It was our assigned novel that year. Saint-Exupéry’s story of a pilot crash landing in the Sahara and encountering a mysterious golden-haired boy from outer space (think David Bowie, but like 8) instantly became one of my favourites. Osborne’s Le Petit Prince is delightful in many ways, but it’s not the book. Purists, take note.

That Old Feeling: Robert Budreau’s Born to Be Blue

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue.

Whenever a movie comes out about a musician I have high expectations. Will the movie fall into clichés about the troubled artist who’s abused by the wrong people? Or will we witness the story of a gifted individual who sins against his talent? One of the worst films for me was Sidney Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues, the overly melodramatic portrait of Billie Holiday that came out in 1972. One of the best was 2014’s Love & Mercy, a beautifully rendered portrait of Brian Wilson. That picture not only captured Wilson’s talent as a composer, it also took the risk of embracing his mental health and how he was able to find creative relief in his music in spite of the voices he heard in his head. 

The story of the troubled-yet-gifted jazz musician Chet Baker is nicely rendered in Robert Budreau’s movie Born to Be Blue, but it falls short of making the most important connection of Baker with his muse. Ethan Hawke, who plays the famous trumpeter, immerses himself into Baker’s troubled soul with complete abandon. Baker, a heroin addict to the end of his life (he died in 1988 at the age of 58), was one of the biggest stars in music during the mid-fifties with his James Dean look and his romantic music. To make his point, Budreau contrasts Baker’s career with two musicians from the New York jazz establishment, namely Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, who believed Baker was too cute to be taken seriously in be-bop circles. To them a jazz musician “had to live” in order to be credible. The point is made, but the one-dimensional Miles and Dizzy characters seem like props rather than real people. Actor Kevin Hansard ingratiates Gillespie with humour while degrading Baker on his “flat” singing style. Kedar Brown plays Davis with so much attitude that he left me cold. Miles was edgy and smug by most accounts, but he wasn’t always the prick of the hour. 

The Comeback Kid: Brendan Saye in Romeo and Juliet

National Ballet of Canada dancer Brendan Saye. (Photo: Sian Richards)

Tears flowed recently at Romeo and Juliet and not only during the spine-tingling death scene. This past Saturday's matinee performance in Toronto marked the return of National Ballet of Canada dancer Brendan Saye to the stage after a nearly three year absence battling Lyme disease. Tears of joy and relief streaked the dancer's face as he bowed to members of the audience crying with him during a standing ovation. The 25-year-old had overcome all kinds of odds to perform Romeo so elegantly and with a surfeit of genuine feeling, causing emotions to run high.

She Loves Me: Bock and Harnick’s Musical Shop

Zachary Levi and Michael McGrath in She Loves Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Blithe, melodic and entrancing, She Loves Me, which recently opened in a pleasing revival at the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54, is one of those Broadway musicals with a complicated lineage. It began as a 1937 play called Parfumerie by the Hungarian writer Miklós László (it was the last of his plays to be produced in Budapest before he fled to America to escape the Nazis). Three years later it furnished the source material for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, perhaps the greatest of all Hollywood romantic comedies, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The movies recycled it again in two considerably inferior versions, a 1949 musical called In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson and an updated Nora Ephron comedy, You’ve Got Mail (1998), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. And in 1963 Joe Masteroff (three years before he wrote the book for Cabaret) and Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (a mere year before they furnished the score for Fiddler on the Roof) turned it into She Loves Me.

Tensions between History and Film: Bridge of Spies

Mark Rylance (as Rudolf Abel) and Tom Hanks (as James Donovan) in Bridge of Spies.

Near the conclusion of Steven Spielberg’s recent film Bridge of Spies, lawyer James Donovan (Tom Hanks), on a train that takes him from East to West Berlin, looks out in horror at two individuals being shot at the recently built Wall. The scene instantly recalls John le Carré’s 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and its 1965 Martin Ritt film adaption of the same name that begins and ends with corpses raked with bullets. Moreover, both films are drenched in atmospherics: the washed-out bluish cinematography of East Berlin in Bridge is similar to the black-and-white desolation and soullessness of the earlier film. The cinematography in The Spy suits the cynicism and betrayal inherent in the plot. Similarly, the visual representation of East Berlin in Bridge compliments the cold desolation of a police state that looks more like war-devastated 1945 Berlin than 1961 West Berlin.

There, however, the similarities end. The contrast in the cinematography between East Berlin and a sunlit Brooklyn is one indication of how Spielberg offers a glossy, more upbeat, interpretation of the Cold War. It is also hard to imagine him including an American official uttering anything like what Control, the head of Circus (an amalgam of MI5 and MI6) says in The Spy to his agent Alec Leamas: “Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can’t afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition, can they?” Or later when Leamas says to the Communist idealist, Liz Gold (played by Nam Perry in the film): “What do you think spies are? .... They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me.” Adam Sisman in John le Carré: The Biography (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals that the cynicism infusing le Carré’s novel – we are no better than them – reflected the unhappiness in his personal and professional life. Feeling trapped in his marriage, agent David Cornwall (before he became le Carré) was also disgusted by the number of former Nazis courted by British intelligence during the Cold War, and he had to work with them. Yet in the anger that he channelled into The Spy and subsequent novels, le Carré reveals insightful truths about the soul-destroying work of spies and raises questions about the damage that can be done to a free society by the methods that are carried out by the security services, questions that remain relevant today.