John Irvin's TINKER TAILOR

  

“In my jungle, you’d be just another asshole.”

The director John Irvin died last month.  He wasn’t a brand name, and he wasn’t identified with any particular genre.  His best-known picture is probably Hamburger Hill, from 1987.  But he made two indelible stories: le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War.

The Dogs of War was Forsyth’s third novel, and it has a convoluted back story.  The plot involves a mercenary-led coup against a corrupt African dictatorship, and Forsyth created a legend that he was prepping a coup himself, against Equatorial Guinea – which got him inside the world of guns for hire, and gives the book its nuts-and-bolts authenticity - but also suggested to the wrong people that Forsyth’s invented coup was the real deal, and there was later an actual coup in Guinea, similar in many ways to the paramilitary operation mounted in Forsyth’s novel. 

The movie streamlines the story considerably, without making it less morally ambiguous or any less savage.  The preparation is in itself fascinating – Bill Goldman once said the trick to a good heist movie is that you show the audience how it’s done, and the story arc is much like a robbery picture, the pitch, the recon, the score – and then the moral reckoning.  Forsyth is said to have disliked the picture, which may be because of the necessary compressions in the script, but there’s no wasted motion.

The mini-series adaption of Tinker Tailor takes a far more circular approach, with a lot of breathing room, none of which lets any of the air out of its tires.  It’s consistently nerve-wracking.  Le Carré, it should be admitted, doesn’t suffer from the long-form.  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet’s 1967 movie of Call for the Dead) are very good pictures, both with a runtime of just under two hours, but generally speaking, le Carré is better when you don’t cut corners.  The Little Drummer Girl is a terrific book, and it turns in on itself, winding the clock.  The 1984 movie with Diane Keaton is an honorable attempt, but the 2018 adaption, with Florence Pugh, is a masterpiece.  The same can be said of Tinker Tailor and its sequel, Smiley’s People.  Each of the television versions run a full six hours. 

Tinker Tailor is very much script-driven, and Arthur Hopcraft’s screenplay is labyrinthine without becoming unnecessarily tortuous.  It also has an extraordinary cast, beginning with Guinness, but with Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase and Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs, Joss Ackland, Ian Bannen, Hywel Bennett, Patrick Stewart (in a cameo), Nigel Stock, Sian Phillips, and the incomparable Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon.

Tony Pierce-Roberts’ other cinematography credits include The Remains of the Day and one of my own secret enthusiasms, A Private Function.  But managing this herd of cats was John Irvin’s job description.  It was a five-month shoot, complicated by logistics issues and the threat of strikes.  Alec Guinness reportedly had cold feet about playing Smiley, at the outset, but Irvin wouldn’t humor him.  Asked later what he thought about the director, Guinness said, “Balls behind the camera.”

“Being a director is the most privileged existence there is,” Irvin remarked of his career.  "It's the best table in the restaurant."