Spy In Your Eye

It is a sad fact that we now live in a more paranoid world where traffic surveillance, and identity theft are common place. During times such as these it is no surprise that the spy film is alive and well. These films adapted from the fiction of Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum, are a reminder of the once monolithic popularity that the espionage genre had in print and on the silver screen. The first modern spy novel Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903), was not made into a feature film until seventy-five years after it was written, but from the early sound era, spies have played an important role in the development of the literary and cinematic thriller. The following films are quintessential examples of the symbiotic relationship that this literary genre has had with its big screen counterpart.

Journey into Fear (1942) Based on Eric Ambler's popular tale of Turkish intrigue, this early Mercury production boasts Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten years before their definitive thriller The Third Man (1949). Ambler, one of the most famous of the pre-Cold War spy fiction authors, was an acknowledged influence on Fleming as well as being an accomplished filmmaker and screenwriter. This inevitably led to his novels Background to Danger (1943) and Mask of Dimitrios (1944), being adapted for the screen following the success of the Welles film. Although he possessed none of the literary flair of fellow spy novelist Graham Greene, Ambler helped establish a fan base for espionage entertainment, that ultimately exploded with the arrival of one James Bond.

From Russia With Love (1963) The second Bond film and the only one which classifies as true espionage, it is also one of Fleming's best novels balancing character and intrigue with liberal sprinklings of sex and sadism. Sean Connery embodied the ideal of the spy for generations, but his winking style and conspicuous public image soon made a cartoon of the character's clandestine origins. The series was to take a giant leap forward with the next film, embracing the thrill-ride formula that has served it very well for the last four decades.

The Ipcress File (1965) Fellow countryman Len Deighton was perhaps Ian Fleming's most significant rival during the heyday of the Sixties spy craze. His working class hero, unnamed in the four novels in which he appeared, was an important counterweight to the suave agent 007 who reflected Fleming's own snobbish materialism. Deighton instead focused on his protagonist's rebellious nature and cynicism for authority, caring most about his gourmet cooking, an obsession which the author also shared. The film, produced by Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman and starring a young, myopically cool Michael Caine was the kitchen-sink alternative to Connery, and the public, hungry for spies in all sizes eagerly embraced this vulnerable hero.

The Deadly Affair (1967) Aside from Fleming, John LeCarre is the most famous real-life spy to use his own experience in the intelligence service as fodder for a series of novels that depict this secret world with an uncompromising reality. This film, based on LeCarre's Call for the Dead, the first book to feature his methodical agent George Smiley, is a superbly realized adaptation by director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn (Goldfinger). Here is the dirtier business of spying, with all of the duplicity, callousness and emotional pain that is inherent in LeCarre's dark bureaucratic universe. Starring Lumet favourite James Mason, in another of his definitive portrayals of middle-aged weariness, this was to be one of the last feature films to embrace the ordinary agent, one whose fallible intellect was more effective than the most sophisticated weaponry.