If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

best movie i've ever seen.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

It's hard to believe that Martin Ritt had anything to do with this stunning movie, let alone produce and direct it. No doubt he was inspired by the taut script, the fine players and particularly the brilliant camera-work of Oswald Morris whose atmospheric lighting contributes so subtly yet inexorably to the movie's over-all impact and power.In his best performance ever, Richard Burton plays with just the right touch of cynicism and latent romanticism. It's a difficult role, yet he brings it off perfectly. Burton seems to be the sort of player who can rise magnificently to a challenge. But give him a role he can play without subtlety or shadings and he will give a performance as phony and unconvincing as the rankest amateur.Despite her star billing, Claire Bloom has actually a definitely subsidiary role. But she too plays with charisma and conviction.Burton's real opposite number is actually the brilliant Oskar Werner who manages to make his characterization more engaging and sympathetic than the film's nominal good guys. Van Eyck likewise impresses in his brief guest spot as the monstrous Mundt. The support line-up includes a number of well-known and reliable faces including Michael Hordern and Bernard Lee.No expense has been spared on gritty sets and utterly believable locations in which the script's edge-of-the-seat double crossing is so suspense-fully unwound.OTHER VIEWS: Some movies cry out for color, just as others demand black-and-white. This attractively drab antidote to the high-fashion fantasy of the phony James Bond is a film whose stark emotional power could only be effectively conveyed in the gray, misty tones of an old newsreel, in the searing documentary dreariness and despair of actual counter-espionage where glamour is a pokey little library, a hole-in-the wall delicatessen, a seedy Soho strip club, the dank stone floor of a prison cell.Oswald Morris, who won the British Film Academy Award in 1964 for The Pumpkin Eater and was to win it again for his cinematography of "The Hill" in 1965, deservedly made it three-in-a-row with his equally moody lensing and lighting of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". — JHR writing as George Addison.

******SPOILER******Throughout the entire film the story and Leames's depressed topcoat and Nan's undecided despair love against him are moving in a straight line. The end is so natural, this film could not be considered another ending.

Martin Ritt's cinematic re-enactment of John le Carré's sensational spy novel, is a somber pièce- de-résistance countervails the much sought-after James Bond franchise (which, over 60 years later, is still a juggernaut groovy train), de-glamorizes its Martini, shaken not stirred screen preconception, and adjusts an intractably realistic spin on the treachery and disillusion of the Janus-faced veiled by the Cold War paranoia. One year after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas (Burton, supremely jaded and miffed) is devolved from the head of UK's West Berlin office after one of his best double-agent is shot dead in the chilling opening long shot. Back to London, a dispirited Alec is reassigned as an insignificant librarian, and strikes up a romantic liaison with his younger co-worker, the self-effacing Nancy Perry (Bloom), although they hold different political persuasions, Nancy is a communist, the idealistic type. After an impulsive physical assault on Patmore (Lee, the first"M" in the Bond series), a grocery shop owner who possibly holds a racist animosity towards Alec's Irish lineage, he is put in prison, and after his release, he is contacted by the member of the East German Intelligence Service, deemed as a potential defector on the face of his demeaning situations. Soon the story reveals that everything aforementioned is a front, in fact, Alec is undertaking a clandestine mission designated by Control, the chief of UK's Secret Intelligence Service (an inscrutably poised Cyril Cusack, not minces word about the vocation's seedy modus operandi), to act as a faux-defector to East Germany and deliver incriminating information to frame a high rank East German officer Mundt (van Eyck) as a paid informant, so that Mundi will be executed by his enterprising deputy Fiedler (Werner). So Alec assiduously climbs the pecking order to gain the trust of his enemies (where Ritt knowingly jeers at the callous rank superiority in the communist party) and finally reaches East Germany where he is under personal interrogation by Fiedler, he tactfully doles out spotty disinformation and gradually earns Fiedler's trust. Everything goes well according to the plan, during a secret tribunal where Mundt is tried, Fiedler's impassioned accusation seems spotless, but one person's appearance tips the scale, but that is not all, the film still pulls the wool over our eyes, until a final twist, in the fashion of Billy Wilder's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957), clears the ulterior motive, and casts an unnerving pathos when Alec delivers the revealing condemnation about the true nature of spy, he and Nancy are given the chance to scramble that damned wall for safety, but at that point, all bets are off. Unflinching in foregrounding its source novel's ingrained skepticism and fatalism, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD sustains a compelling narrative arc without resorting to action spectacles (gunshots only being fired in two occasions), meanwhile DP. Oswald Morris' expressively noir-ish cinematography and Sol Kaplan's indelibly enthralling score speak volumes of the bleak context where the world is governed by sinister conspiracies and people like Alec and Nancy, however diligent or innocent, are expendable pawns who can never outrun their sorry fate, In retrospect, the film should have been Mr. Burton's crowning point to take that Oscar golden statue which would elude his entire life, he is nominated but loses out to Lee Marvin's Manichaean turn in CAT BALLOU (1965), which as time goes by, looks like a travesty to an increasing extent. Mr. Burton is absolutely at his most impenetrable in limning Alec's flinty carapace during his high-wire act, and most poignant in emoting his smoldering frustration and self-loath when he realizes that he has accidentally consummated his assignment, but at the expense of his conviction to humanity. The supporting cast is also exceptional, significant players like Bloom and Werner, instigate great two-handers - the former plies the story with a tinge of well-balanced warmth whereas the latter is memorably eloquent and radiant to fight for his noble cause, respectively with Mr. Burton, without being overshadowed by the latter's incandescent flair, and a solemn-looking Peter van Eyck ekes out a transfixing about-face moment, with a bloodthirsty dagger nevertheless in his hands. An outright engrossing spy thriller, pulls no punches in challenging its indulgent audience, and steadfastly establishes its growing cachet as a film par excellence in its own genre.

A terrific film on the cold war espionage that is shoot in an era of cold war and seems extremely real.Perhaps, all this was real. Though this was an adaptation from the fiction novel of the same name written by John Le Carre. It depicts cold bloodedness and the brutality of the cold war era (1945-1991) when it was at it's peak in 1950's and 1960's. The writing is impeccable and sharp. To make a complex novel which involves many characters, most of whom are not in the scene but are mere references who will never be shown is a challenge in itself. We never know, who the actual Control was, the actual English spies were. There is a whole lot of verbiage that seemed new to me. Despite the fact that I have seen a similar film called "TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY" based on the same novel by the same novelist John Le Carre. I suppose Carre is a supreme writer of the cold war espionage films and his ability and detailing are unmatched. The acting is supreme by an ensemble cast led by Richard Burton. The cinematography and the production design were great and the style shall be replicated in many espionage films going forward too. But it's the writing and the acting above all that make this a must watch. I am happy to have seen this though years later. Also, I am intrigued more now by what have happened to those spies and what all went on in that era between, the British, the Germans and the Russians. A 4/5 for this film.