The Deadly Affair ***** (1966, James Mason, Maximilian Schell, Simone Signoret, Harry Andrews, Harriet Andersson) – Classic Movie Review 2113

Producer-director Sidney Lumet’s important, serious-minded 1966 spy thriller from John le Carré’s Call for the Dead is, as it should be, chilling, dour and downbeat, but rivetingly compelling. James Mason plays le Carré’s famous British secret agent George Smiley, here called Charles Dobbs.

Director Lumet brings his American beady eye to the seedy English locations and makes the most of his special cast. While attending to the moody, doomy atmosphere, he ensures that are enough spy thrills and suspense too, as security officer Dobbs investigates the suspicious circumstances behind the apparent suicide of a high-ranking colleague Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng) from the Foreign Office, a man he has just shared a friendly chat with.

An anonymous typed letter had accused Fennan of being a Communist while at Oxford University. Senior officials want the circumstances surrounding the death swept under the carpet and are happy it is officially called a suicide.

This sets Dobbs off on a tour of eccentric characters – senior officials, old friend Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell), a colleague and a retired policeman – who, bit by bit, reveal that Fennan was assassinated and behind it all there is a web of spies. The mild-mannered Dobbs resigns in protest when his superior tries to take him off the case, and then finds himself under threat from an espionage ring.

The Deadly Affair is securely based on an engrossing screenplay by Paul Dehn, the screenwriter of the previous year’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Literate dialogue, memorable characters and clever, complex plotting vie for attention with the expert acting and Freddie Young’s bleakly evocative location Technicolor cinematography.

Simone Signoret (as Elsa Fennan), Harry Andrews (as Inspector Mendel), Harriet Andersson (as Charles’s errant wife Ann Dobbs), Kenneth Haigh (as Bill Appleby), Max Adrian, Robert Flemyng, Roy Kinnear, Lynn Redgrave, Leslie Sands, Corin Redgrave, Les White, June Murphy and David Warner also grace the distinguished cast.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2113

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