The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965)

Richard Burton is "Leamus" (right) and Cyril Cusak is "Control" (left) in director Martin Ritt's film adaptation of John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The conversation below is from the debriefing scene after one of Leamus's agents is shot while crossing a checkpoint from East to West Berlin.

Though classified as a "spy film", The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is in many ways a portrait of British class relations: the skilled and knowledgeable ploughman showing stiffness is offered a junior management position in the town granary, but is too proud (conflicted? Irish?) to take it.  

CONTROL: It's like metal fatigue. We have to live without sympathy, don't we. We can't do that forever. One can't stay out of doors all the time. One needs to come in. In from the cold.

LEAMUS: I'm an operator, Control. Just an operator.

CONTROL: There's a vacancy in Banking Section that might suit you--

LEAMUS: Sorry, I'm an operational man. I take my pension; I don't want at desk job.

CONROL: You don't know what's on the desk.

LEAMUS: Paper.

"professional senses"

You read enough of anything and you see patterns. Le Carré's protagonists are brilliant thinkers, but that doesn't free them of their anguish. Humiliations run the gamut, from the personal to the professional. 

My favourite LeCarré moments come when an agent goes on "operational alert." From there on in, everything is "Method". 

"... I was halfway when I realized I was being followed. I thought at first it might be Larry behind me, or Munslow, because my follower was so quiet that my awareness of him was communicated less by hearing than by my other professional senses: the prickle on your back; the reflection in the air before you, made by someone just behind you; the sense of presence each time you check a shop window and see nothing." (213)