Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
after John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)

Not following the robust wall that fell
but an uneven grey wall
an almost paper-maché wall
with scraggly barbed wire
sweeping over pavement
with puddles of recent rain
until the first spoken words,
coffee, sir, are uttered
not as question but as gesture
to the back of Richard Burton’s head.

Ritt turned to black and white
not to capture black and white
but to capture grey in all its variations.
We don’t need the browns of Le Carré.
We don’t need Control’s shabby brown cardigan.
We don’t need Leamas’s apartment with its brown paint.
Nor his brown eyes.
Nor even the shilling’s worth of
the yellow, crumbling geyser of hot water.

With all its grey ambiguities
its reversals,
betrayals and deceits,
chess moves played out in secret
and in open,
in this Cold War
of the blacklisted director.
Which friend is projected onto
the young librarian
with her earnest Communist phrases?
And how poignant the line
We have to live without sympathy, don’t we?
voiced with soft-spoken brutality.

The ever-present black bottle of whisky
with its white diamond label,
the label always facing out
the identical bottle
appearing and re-appearing
handed to Leamas across the pub counter
to slip into an overcoat
appearing on desks and tables,
even in Holland waiting interrogation
with all sides drinking the same drink,
engaging in the same cruel
aimlessness.