Is it just me or are the John le Carré and James Bond movie franchises slowly converging? At the very least, these two still-distinct, venerable, 1960s-era espionage universes are talking to each other, if only in a wink-wink fashion. In the Craig years, the 007 franchise has arguably acquired a soupçon – no more than that – of the emotional urgency and squalid moral compromise that animates Le Carré’s spooks.
Meanwhile, what are we to make of the fact that in the latest Le Carré adaptation, Our Kind Of Traitor, one of the leads is played by Miss Moneypenny herself, Naomie Harris? Or of that phone number handed to Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager: 44 7007 707070? Or that Zermatt, the Swiss town in that series, is shot so as to evoke On Her Majesty’s Secret Service? And are not The Night Manager’s opening credits – all martini glasses morphing into mushroom clouds, etc – as Bond-ian, or as Maurice Binder-ish, as Skyfall’s?
Our Kind Of Traitor is the third Le Carré adaptation in a row to have hands-on Le Carré family involvement, namely the author’s sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell, which brings to mind the passing of the 007 torch to Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. There is also even a knowing reference to the third great 60s UK spy universe, the Len Deighton/Harry Palmer movies: spycatcher Damian Lewis’s costuming – cream raincoat and dark-framed spectacles – is a cheeky riff on Michael Caine’s outfit in The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin.
I don’t mean to suggest that Fleming-Le Carré-Deighton have meshed into a single indistinguishable espiocratic mish-mash: Bond is mostly still a thrill-ride, while Deighton and Le Carré were always in the morality-play game. Although they may partake of each other, they remain as distinct as they always were.
But wait – were they? In the 60s Le Carré was marketed as the bleak moral corrective to the laser-beam and super-villain aesthetic of the Connery-era Bond films, as, in a more class-conscious way, was Deighton/Palmer. But not when it came to the movies. Ipcress may have been a Bond antidote, but like 007 it was produced by Harry Saltzman, as were its two sequels. Guy Hamilton directed Goldfinger and Funeral In Berlin. Paul Dehn co-scripted The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Goldfinger within months of each other. And the last Palmer film, Billion Dollar Brain, directed by that noted social-realist Ken Russell, closed the circuit completely with its very own babes’n’bullets credit sequence, designed by Binder.
So maybe they were on a collision course from the very beginning, after all.
