Living Lies

The Deadly Affair. Novelist John le Carre has set himself up as the spycho-analyst of the cold war. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was made into the most intelligent suspense movie of 1965, he candled the head of an aging agent and found all the sickness of the century inside. In Call for the Dead, an early le Carre thriller that has now been made into an entertaining but less original film, he calls in another sad old spy to define the meaning of treason in our time.

Again the hero is a nice man caught up in a nasty business, a middle-aged British agent (James Mason) assigned to check out an official (Robert Flemyng) in the Foreign Office who has been anonymously denounced as a Russian spy. Same day investigation starts, subject is found dead. Police report suicide, Mason suspects murder. Suspicion leads down a corpse-strewn trail of betrayal that ends at the hero's own door. The dead man has been betrayed by his wife (Simone Signoret), a Russian agent. The wife in turn is betrayed by the spymaster (Maximilian Schell) who employs her. The spymaster then betrays the hero, a longtime friend, by seducing his sex-starved wife (Harriet Andersson). But the hero, in the last analysis, perpetrates the ultimate betrayal: he is false to himself.

Scenarist Paul Dehn, who also wrote the script for Spy, this time too often jumps the main track of the tale to lollygag along a branch line, and Director Sidney Lumet (The Group) has either miscast or misdirected some of his principals. Mason and Signoret, however, are pathetically impressive as a couple of mice wandering in a maze designed for rats. And as a whole, the film convincingly elucidates in a modern instance why Dante consigned traitors to the very pit of hell. Le Carre similarly perceives treason as a spiritual attitude underlying the political act. His traitors are liars who live out their lie. His meaning of treason is the loss of self.

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