Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1965

The Contenders:

Lee Marvin: Cat Ballou (winner)
Laurence Olivier: Othello
Rod Steiger: The Pawnbroker
Oskar Werner: Ship of Fools
Richard Burton: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Hypothermia

Film: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Format: DVD from Western District Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Think of the spy genre, and you probably think of James Bond or Jason Bourne. Perhaps the Mission: Impossible movies are more your speed. Regardless, when it comes to subgenres, spy films tend to fall firmly in the larger category of action movies. If you don’t get a little witty banter, some explosions and at least one quality death, it feels like a rip off. That was the big complaint for many about a film like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: compared with the rest of the genre and compared with expectations, it’s just a film where men sit in rooms and think at each other really hard. Well, that’s more the speed of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as well. It’s not a coincidence that it comes originally from the pen of the same author, John Le Carre.

TSWCIFTC is a Cold War film both in terms of when it was made and in terms of the era it depicts. Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is in charge of the West Germany section of “The Circus,” the intelligence gathering organization of Le Carre’s spy world. When yet another of his spies is killed crossing over from East Germany into West, Leamas is recalled to London. He’s offered a desk job, but doesn’t want it, preferring to stay out “in the cold” as a field operative. And so he’s given another task, this time to entrap the East German agent who has been the cause of so many deaths of his own men.