#toby esterhase

[pummelingbat]

best friend sent me this & said "this is how everyone in the Circus talks to George Smiley" & i haven't been able to stop thinking about it since

[flammentanz]

Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"

[saintfu]

Smiley's People (miniseries) - Wikipedia

I’ve seen this so many times, I practically know it by heart. The excellent performances and naturalistic direction give the world a lived-in feeling. The people that Smiley encounters throughout have lives before he walks through them, and will go on after he’s gone.

One of the things that I noticed most this time round was the detail in the production. The way that life seems to be going on around Smiley sometimes makes it feel like a documentary. As an example, the book contains these lines, as Smiley waits for the cab driver Lamb to arrive: “An elderly couple had settled opposite him. The man wore a stiff Homburg hat and was playing war tunes on a tin whistle. He wife grinned inanely at the passers-by.” Two sentences, just adding color to Smiley’s perception of his surroundings, that could easily be ignored by a director, but about thirteen and a half minutes into episode 2, we get this: https://imgur.com/R6njW5j

Another thing I noticed — not for the first time — on this rewatch was the music. I love the music for this, and I’d love to get hold of the soundtrack. As far as I can tell, it was only issued on vinyl, and only in the UK.

Speaking of music, the song playing in Claus Kretzschmar’s nightclub is possibly the most (deliberately) awful sexy rock ever committed on television. The whole nightclub scene is ridiculous (one of the performers can be seen chewing gum during her show). Later, when Kretzschmar asks Smiley what he thought of the show, one can imagine Smiley summoning up a lifetimes practice in deception to tell him, “It was very artistic.”

The nightclub scene is odd when one considers that, unlike Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this appeared on regular commercial television in the US, rather than on PBS, where nudity was winked at in the service of highbrow entertainment. The US version is shorter than the UK version, but the nightclub scene is virtually intact.

A few other thoughts: the only cast member with which I have any issue whatsoever is Eileen Atkins. She’s fine as Ostrakova, but was a fill-in for Judi Dench, who apparently had another commitment. For myself, though, I think they should have had someone like Patsy Byrne.

Michael Byrne plays Peter Guillam this time around. He’s a much more domesticated version of the character, with a settled job and a new wife.

Toby Esterhase comes into his own as a character, particularly in episodes 5 & 6. We get to see why the service has kept such an apparently weasley character on for so long: he’s very, very good at his job.

Next up: le Carré steps out of the US-USSR conflict for the first time with The Little Drummer Girl.  

[spockvarietyhour]

Grigoriev: I want to be a colonel in the British Army.I want uniform! Toby: *god give me strength* yeah, sure whatever, you’ll have all the uniforms you want, I gotta go now, now, christ, bye.

[idlesuperstar]

George, do me a favour, okay? You want a Hungarian babysitter someday, call me. You go messing around with creeps like Kirov and Leipzig, you better have a creep like Toby look after you. You're an old spy in a hurry, George. You used to say they were the worst.

Bernard Hepton [19th Oct 1925 - 30th July 2018] as tiny Toby Esterhase in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [BBC, 1979] and Smiley’s People [BBC, 1982]. 

There is a lovely obit in The Guardian detailing his career, especially his extensive pre-telly work in theatre as actor, director, and director of the Liverpool Playhouse in the 60s.  

[cinemaocd]

Discourse: Michael Jayston’s audiobook reading of Toby Esterhase is better than either of the actors who played him in the mini/movie...

[saintfu]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film) - Wikipedia

I’m sure that if I didn’t love the book so much, I wouldn’t dislike this movie as much as I do. It isn’t a bad movie, really, just an unremarkable one.

The thing that I find so infuriating about it is not what was left out — any book to film has to jettison elements to make it fit — but the inexplicable changes. One of the novel’s great strengths is the interplay between characters and setting. Le Carré develops his setting by establishing the relationships of people within his fictional spy agency, the Circus. At the center of this web of relationships is the novel’s main character, George Smiley. Smiley is personally connected to nearly every character in the novel as a mentor, colleague or rival. Showing these relationships as the plot progresses, gives a depth to the setting, and a greater weight to the central issue of the book, the effect on a community of a betrayal by one of its most prominent members.

The movie throws most of that out the window, and in a lot of cases it’s hard to figure out why. Toby Esterhase’s connection to Smiley, for instance is moved to Control. Why? Roy Bland is aged up and his backstory erased. Ricki Tarr is transformed from a thug and mild sociopath to a romantic hero. Peter Guillam is now gay.

(With this last point, at least, I think I understand their motivation. The miniseries left out Guillam’s plot in the book in which he undergoes a kind of nervous breakdown in slow motion thanks to the hunt for the mole and his unhealthy relationship with his eccentric musician girlfriend. There’s not really enough time to do this story well on screen, so they simplified it by having Guillam break up with his partner for reasons of security. This has the bonus of giving Benedict Cumberbatch an opportunity to cry onscreen.)

The plot of the novel has a lot of moving parts, and they fit together very well. The changes the movie makes leave glaring gaps in the plot. For instance: In order to make Ricki Tarr a romantic hero, they have excised his common-law wife and daughter. But, in the book, it is Tarr’s effort to protect them that exposes the connection between the mole and Operation Witchcraft. Without that, Smiley in the film has no clear way to establish the connection, and he has to be told about the connection rather than figuring it out himself.

This version of Smiley seems much less intelligent and capable than most other versions of the character. His interrogation of Toby Esterhase on the runway is a perfect example. No wit, persuasive argument or shared history. Just, “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll have you deported to Hungary where you’ll be arrested, tortured and killed.”

There are a number of scenes that seem to exist only to provide momentary drama without making much sense. Besides the runway scene, there’s the gratuitous murder of Tufty Thesenger and Irina’s execution in front of Jim Prideaux.

OK, I’ve gone on too long about this. Next up, Smiley’s People.

[hitchell-mope]

Classic perp sweating.