Yet, despite all that, the film is not great. Neither in the manifest way that a 2001: A Space Odyssey nor a Tokyo Story are, nor in the more subtly great way that a similarly dark tale like The Third Man is. And, I suspect that is because the whole thrust of the tale is small. Yes, it is a Cold War thriller, but compare it to other films that came out in that era — the David Lean epics, the revolutionary pyrotechnics of a Bonnie And Clyde or The Wild Bunch, the aforementioned 2001 or even The Planet Of the Apes. I’m not stating that a film has to be writ large to be great, as my prior mention of Tokyo Story proves; but it should resonate to a larger audience, in space and time. The dilemma of Alec Leamas simply does not. His world is a small one, with Byzantine codes of conduct that outsiders, such as his librarian lover, Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), cannot grasp.
And, while I mention her, Bloom is one of the drags on the film. It’s not so much that she badly acts her part, but that her part is simply one of the few key roles that is not well written. Yes, she’s the love interest, but, wisely, Ritt does not hammer that point home in the film with mushy love scenes. But her character always acts like a lost puppy dog — a Communist Party member who, even in the mid-'60s, a decade after the revelations of Stalinist terror, is still a true believer, and utterly naïve about the Communist system’s flaws and horrors. This becomes excruciatingly painful to watch in the East German military courtroom scene where Fielder, Leamas, and British counter-spy Mundt (Peter Van Eyck) have a set-to, while Perry stands doe-eyed. It’s simply not plausible because a) of the aforementioned time frame the film takes place in, and b) Bloom’s age. She was in her mid-thirties at the time of filming, and her character looks that age, too. Were Perry a naïf coed, her reactions, character-wise, might have some credulity, but not at her age.
There are a few other areas where the film falls short, such as the injection of an anti-Semitic subplot that, while it worked in the novel, seems just tacked on in this abridged form. As example, the Nan Perry character, in the book, is called Liz Gold, thus the whole use of that trope has a deeper resonance that is lost in the film. Also, while the courtroom and escape scenes finally reveal the real intricacies of the plot and counter-plot, they occur so quickly that most viewers will likely be lost.
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