The Deadly Affair [HD]

Call For the Dead
The Deadly Affair is one of the better John Le Carre screen adaptations. Based on 'Call For the Dead,' the title's not the only name change: though he's called Charles Dobbs here, James Mason is really George Smiley while Maximilian Schell's character also undergoes a name change from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold because Paramount still owned the character names. Shot in 1966, when Britain seemed to be closed due to bad weather (a look made even grimmer by Freddie Young pre-exposing the film stock to mute the colours), Sidney Lumet's low-key and very small-scale thriller works much successfully on screen than you might expect. Where many LeCarres fail because, as someone once said, they're all plot and no story, this has at its heart a fairly good mystery - why did a cabinet minister commit suicide AFTER being cleared of allegations of spying, and was it suicide or murder?

This is from that period when Mason's screen image was shifting from aggressive and domineering...

Flawed, but still an interesting adaptation of le Carre's Call for the Dead with James Mason as George Smiley, aka Charles Dobbs
For an espionage thriller I like a lot, The Deadly Affair is also one of the most frustrating. The movie is based on John le Carre's first book, Call for the Dead. It introduced his readers to George Smiley. For some reason, in addition to changing the name of the book, director Sidney Lumet changed George Smiley to Charles Dobbs (James Mason). I'll continue to call him George Smiley. The story is how this aging British spy with a quiet manner and a shrewd mind finally learns the identity of an East German spy. It starts when Smiley is asked to investigate a mid-level foreign officer, Samuel Fennan, who has been accused in an anonymous letter of being, at best, a Communist sympathizer. Smiley determines that the man is not a danger, but shortly after the man commits suicide...yet he left a wake-up call for the next morning. Smiley's boss tells him to drop it. Smiley won't, quits, and enlists the help of a retired police inspector, Mendel (Harry Andrews), to help him. Smiley meets the...

A solid movie
I am a major collector of John Le'Carre books and movies. My favorite book is "A Call for the Dead" which is where this film finds it plot. I could accept the changes to the story to make it play for Hollywood but I did not see the point or reason to alter the plot the way they did. I could more or less accept the casting choices and character portrayal but I have to admit I was not pleased with most of the casting choices nor their portrayal. I found the soundtrack to be very intrusive and almost over-powering. I think Quincy Jones was a poor choice to prepare a soundtrack for an English "Spy" film. Yet with all of these seemingly negative comments I have to say that overall it was a solid film. Well directed and acted (minus the soundtrack of course). My problem is that I am a die-hard Le'Carre fan but I have to say that If it cannot be perfect, this would be close enough.

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