10 Best Spy Films That AREN'T James Bond
5. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
It's hard to think of an author whose name looms larger on the espionage genre than John Le Carré. While Fleming defined the image of the post-war spy in popular culture, Le Carré's work cut deeper to the bone, avoiding notions of wartime adventure to tell stories drawn from his own experiences as an agent for MI6 during the Cold War.
He'd begun his writing career while working in British Intelligence, transitioning to that line of work full-time after his cover was blown by one of the Cambridge Five - an event that formed the basis for perhaps Le Carré's most famous work, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was adapted first as a TV series starring Alec Guinness as the stoic George Smiley in 1979, and then as a film in 2011, with Gary Oldman taking on the role.
But the author's first major success was published a decade earlier - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was itself adapted into a film in 1965. Nothing less than a devastating suffusion of noir and post-war British realism, director Martin Ritt deftly navigated the chilly, intricate and discombobulating nature of Le Carré's novel, depicting spycraft not as a glamorous, exciting series of jaunts, but as a bleak, zero-sum game of chess where the board is stacked with pawns waiting to be sacrificed.
Superbly orchestrated by Ritt with typically sublime photography from Oswald Morris - plus an intoxicatingly fatigued performance from Richard Burton - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is definitive Cold War cinema.