Not having seen last year's Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy by Tomas Alfredson, I can't draw comparisons between it and this, its antecedent, The Deadly Affair which I suppose was one of the main reasons why this film screened at the festival this year. Instead I saw The Deadly Affair as sort of an anti-James Bond affair.
Director Sidney Lumet and his crew, which includes cinematographer Freddy Young, plant us in a drab and rather dingy London where intelligence officer Charles Dobbs plies his trade. He gives a routine interview to a fairly low-level functionary whose job requires higher security clearance. Things go well but the man is found dead shortly after his meeting with Dobbs. It is ruled a suicide but something isn't quite right.
James Mason plays our protagonist in an understated way. Mrs. Dobbs, played by Harriet Andersson, an Ingmar Bergman protégé, is much younger than him and their marriage is shaky, at best. She goes out to parties and sleeps with other men while all Dobbs can manage is to accept defeat and put on a happy face for others. The Dobbs' home is nothing special and just one of many such houses crammed together on an average block somewhere in London.
An interview with the dead man's wife, Elsa, who is a Holocaust survivor, reveals that she is lying. This is a wonderful scene with longish takes and a lot of silence as Dobbs sits in her living room silently waiting for her to make a cuppa tea and join him. Elsa is played by Simone Signoret and her eyes are piercing. Full of sadness for her loss and of contempt for Dobbs and his brethren who play the Cold War game. A snarky supervisor dubbed “Marlene Dietrich” by those in the Home Office and his refusal to see that there is more to this case than meets the eye prompts Dobbs to resign and pursue the case on his own. To that end he conscripts his old friend Mendel, a retired cop who still has connections on the street. Mendel provides some comic relief here with his tendency to nod off when the going gets slow. Their investigation leads them to uncover a typical case of Cold War espionage in which Elsa was passing along secrets to Dieter Frey, an old acquaintance of Dobbs' from World War II and with whom Mrs. Dobbs was having an affair.
The Deadly Affair was released in 1966 so, for modern audiences, the Cold War is either something read about in a history book or a fading memory. (And World War II is, perhaps, downright ancient.) And it's almost twee to watch a murder investigation done without computers and cell phones. The movie had a very different resonance for audiences in the late 60s but the feelings of drought and weariness and the theme of aging here stand the test of time. A sexless marriage, the recognition for the older gents that their salad days are over – there's this fatalistic aspect to the film that reminded me of The Wild Bunch. Amidst all the double crosses and betrayals, Dobbs laments at one point that everything was so much clearer during the war.
I appreciated the pace of the film. Aside from a car chase, there wasn't much action so the emphasis was squarely on the characters. Facial expressions and silences play a big role here. I'll have to check out Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy since it's still here in Madison to compare and contrast.
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