I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold', John Le Carre's third novel, is a cynical and jaded account of the espoionage buisness, and made the author's name, in part due to this film adaptation starring Richard Burton. Watching it now, it feels very dated, with its black and white photography and primitive soundtrack, though Burton is very good as Alec Leamas: whatever you think of Le Carre as a novelist, he does seem to have a knack of describing people whom the right actors can bring convincingly to life (the television adaptation of 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' being the primary example). Some problems, however, feel like they could have been avoided: neither the frequently referenced but hardly seen character of Smiley, nor the critical personal emnity of Leamis and Mundt, are properly established; and the final drama at the Berlin Wall feels amateurish and pedestrian. It's interesting how much film-making skills advanced over the next 15 years: the famous BBC TV Le Carre's also feel dated (while still brilliant) in some ways, but closer to contemporary standards than they do to this.

It's hard to believe that Martin Ritt had anything to do with this stunning movie, let alone produce and direct it. No doubt he was inspired by the taut script, the fine players and particularly the brilliant camera-work of Oswald Morris whose atmospheric lighting contributes so subtly yet inexorably to the movie's over-all impact and power.In his best performance ever, Richard Burton plays with just the right touch of cynicism and latent romanticism. It's a difficult role, yet he brings it off perfectly. Burton seems to be the sort of player who can rise magnificently to a challenge. But give him a role he can play without subtlety or shadings and he will give a performance as phony and unconvincing as the rankest amateur.Despite her star billing, Claire Bloom has actually a definitely subsidiary role. But she too plays with charisma and conviction.Burton's real opposite number is actually the brilliant Oskar Werner who manages to make his characterization more engaging and sympathetic than the film's nominal good guys. Van Eyck likewise impresses in his brief guest spot as the monstrous Mundt. The support line-up includes a number of well-known and reliable faces including Michael Hordern and Bernard Lee.No expense has been spared on gritty sets and utterly believable locations in which the script's edge-of-the-seat double crossing is so suspense-fully unwound.OTHER VIEWS: Some movies cry out for color, just as others demand black-and-white. This attractively drab antidote to the high-fashion fantasy of the phony James Bond is a film whose stark emotional power could only be effectively conveyed in the gray, misty tones of an old newsreel, in the searing documentary dreariness and despair of actual counter-espionage where glamour is a pokey little library, a hole-in-the wall delicatessen, a seedy Soho strip club, the dank stone floor of a prison cell.Oswald Morris, who won the British Film Academy Award in 1964 for The Pumpkin Eater and was to win it again for his cinematography of "The Hill" in 1965, deservedly made it three-in-a-row with his equally moody lensing and lighting of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". — JHR writing as George Addison.

Martin Ritt's cinematic re-enactment of John le Carré's sensational spy novel, is a somber pièce- de-résistance countervails the much sought-after James Bond franchise (which, over 60 years later, is still a juggernaut groovy train), de-glamorizes its Martini, shaken not stirred screen preconception, and adjusts an intractably realistic spin on the treachery and disillusion of the Janus-faced veiled by the Cold War paranoia. One year after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas (Burton, supremely jaded and miffed) is devolved from the head of UK's West Berlin office after one of his best double-agent is shot dead in the chilling opening long shot. Back to London, a dispirited Alec is reassigned as an insignificant librarian, and strikes up a romantic liaison with his younger co-worker, the self-effacing Nancy Perry (Bloom), although they hold different political persuasions, Nancy is a communist, the idealistic type. After an impulsive physical assault on Patmore (Lee, the first"M" in the Bond series), a grocery shop owner who possibly holds a racist animosity towards Alec's Irish lineage, he is put in prison, and after his release, he is contacted by the member of the East German Intelligence Service, deemed as a potential defector on the face of his demeaning situations. Soon the story reveals that everything aforementioned is a front, in fact, Alec is undertaking a clandestine mission designated by Control, the chief of UK's Secret Intelligence Service (an inscrutably poised Cyril Cusack, not minces word about the vocation's seedy modus operandi), to act as a faux-defector to East Germany and deliver incriminating information to frame a high rank East German officer Mundt (van Eyck) as a paid informant, so that Mundi will be executed by his enterprising deputy Fiedler (Werner). So Alec assiduously climbs the pecking order to gain the trust of his enemies (where Ritt knowingly jeers at the callous rank superiority in the communist party) and finally reaches East Germany where he is under personal interrogation by Fiedler, he tactfully doles out spotty disinformation and gradually earns Fiedler's trust. Everything goes well according to the plan, during a secret tribunal where Mundt is tried, Fiedler's impassioned accusation seems spotless, but one person's appearance tips the scale, but that is not all, the film still pulls the wool over our eyes, until a final twist, in the fashion of Billy Wilder's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957), clears the ulterior motive, and casts an unnerving pathos when Alec delivers the revealing condemnation about the true nature of spy, he and Nancy are given the chance to scramble that damned wall for safety, but at that point, all bets are off. Unflinching in foregrounding its source novel's ingrained skepticism and fatalism, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD sustains a compelling narrative arc without resorting to action spectacles (gunshots only being fired in two occasions), meanwhile DP. Oswald Morris' expressively noir-ish cinematography and Sol Kaplan's indelibly enthralling score speak volumes of the bleak context where the world is governed by sinister conspiracies and people like Alec and Nancy, however diligent or innocent, are expendable pawns who can never outrun their sorry fate, In retrospect, the film should have been Mr. Burton's crowning point to take that Oscar golden statue which would elude his entire life, he is nominated but loses out to Lee Marvin's Manichaean turn in CAT BALLOU (1965), which as time goes by, looks like a travesty to an increasing extent. Mr. Burton is absolutely at his most impenetrable in limning Alec's flinty carapace during his high-wire act, and most poignant in emoting his smoldering frustration and self-loath when he realizes that he has accidentally consummated his assignment, but at the expense of his conviction to humanity. The supporting cast is also exceptional, significant players like Bloom and Werner, instigate great two-handers - the former plies the story with a tinge of well-balanced warmth whereas the latter is memorably eloquent and radiant to fight for his noble cause, respectively with Mr. Burton, without being overshadowed by the latter's incandescent flair, and a solemn-looking Peter van Eyck ekes out a transfixing about-face moment, with a bloodthirsty dagger nevertheless in his hands. An outright engrossing spy thriller, pulls no punches in challenging its indulgent audience, and steadfastly establishes its growing cachet as a film par excellence in its own genre.

Having read the first 4 of John Le Carre's 'George Smiley' books, I might say "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" is my personal favorite.I never thought I would one day like a black and white movie (especially a movie made after a novel...). Somehow, nowadays, script writers turn the plot around 180 degrees and most of the times it seems like the book and the movie have nothing in common (or the movie lacks scenes that are vital for the action). But not this movie. Considering the year during which it had been filmed, I might say that it's quite good. Not impressive. But watchable without finding yourself doing something else in the meantime out of boredom.