Antonia Quirke’s thoughtful, elegiac essay on the battered Richard Burton and his battered overcoat in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was worth the price of the FT earlier this week. Luckily for you, they have for some reason left her superb piece ungated on their website.
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I haven’t seen the movie. But, if it’s not belted, doesn’t that make it an “executive?”
Thank you
A brilliant book, a brilliant movie, and a brilliant essay.
Thanks. A lovely essay.
Since I first saw The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,only eight or nine years ago, it has occupied a place on my list of 15 or 20 favorite films. Richard Burton gave his finest screen performance in this picture, in some ways his only really fine performance. I remember an interview with Burton back in the 70s some time; can’t remember the venue. Burton was talking about the filming of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and especially working with Elizabeth Taylor. Of the first scene they shot together, he said something like “I thought, my God, she can’t do it”, not really understanding at the time that she was giving a film performance, and he was used to giving filmed stage performances. Almost all of his film work is stagey and unconvincing. Of course, Virginia Woolf was a filmed play. But in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold he gave a contained, focused, almost impossibly affecting film performance that stands as a magnificent monument to the abilities that Burton squandered so prodigally throughout the rest of his career.
That’s an acute analysis Herschel (Although I think he gave more than one good performance, for example Becket and Look Back in Anger). I also love Spy Who Came In From The Cold, centrally for Burton but also for the matched mood lighting, camera work and music, it’s a very strong, complete film.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a contender for most over-rated film in history, with everyone one it far better in other things, despite all the accolades it got. Screaming is not acting.