For those who like John le Carré

The 1960s was a time of dark, cynical spy movies, in no small part thanks to writer John le Carré and the movie adaptation of his book The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Recently, I came across another movie based on one of le Carré's books that I hadn't heard of before: The Looking Glass War. So I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie starts off in Finland, a country that was nominally neutral in the Cold War because of the conditions imposed upon it by the Soviets after Finland lost in its little part of World War II. At the airport, a pilot hands over a roll of film in exchange for some cash; the goy who receives the film gets hit by a car walking from the airport to his hotel. (They make a point about his not having taxi fare, but not even bus fare?) We then learn that the roll of film is supposed to have photos suggesting that East Germany was building missiles based on the old Nazi V-2 rockets, with help from the Soviet Union.

This information, unsurprisingly, is concerning to the intellegence community and people like Leclerc (Ralph Richardson). They need to find out whether the information on the film is real or whether they're doctored images. That means getting a physical asset on the ground since they apparently didn't have good enough satellite imagery in those days. But whom to risk? Fortunately, they find somebody they can sacrifice easily if necessarily.

Leiser (Christopher Jones) is a Polish sailor who because of his job has had the ability to move about the world. On a previous occasion when he was in the UK, he knocked up a woman (Susan George, whose character only seems to be credited as "The Girl"). Now, he's like to stay in the UK to raise the baby. But there are immigration laws, and no certainty that Leiser would be admitted to the UK, so he does the logical thing, which is to try to enter the country illegally. Unfortunately for him, this was an era when there weren't a whole swath of NGOs and media outlets actively campaigning for people like him to enter the country illegally, so he was summarily arrested and put in detention to be deported. Leclerc has found out about all this, and so approaches Leiser with the proposition that if he goes on this spy mission, Leclerc will help him get UK citizenship.

However, during the training for the mission, Leiser learns that his girlfriend has had an abortion, so no no baby for him. This sours him somewhat on the mission, but he still undergoes it, going to East Germany where things immediately start to go south.

The problem with a movie like The Looking Glass War is that in the end, it's hard to really care for any of these characters or whether the missiles are real. It's as though the movie is trying so hard to show a dark, cynical attitude that it's too much of it for the movie's own good. Jones as Leiser is too much of a cipher, and it felt to me like there were too many plot holes.

I should add, however, that I'm not the biggest fan of these cynical spy movies from the 1960s; I've never particularly warmed to The Ipcress Files either. So people who like the works of John le Carré and the other movies in the 60s spy cycle will probably have a more positive reaction to The Looking Glass War than I did.