THE LOOKING GLASS WAR
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
Two cynical old spies meet in a bar in Finland. One is a pilot who has surreptitiously taken pictures of a potential missile threat. After grousing about the misery of their thankless jobs, the other one takes away the film canister and walks back to his hotel since the cheap bastards who employee him won't pay for his cab fare anymore. In the bitter cold and snow he is hit by a car and dies.
Cut to London where two spy masters walk down a marbled corridor. The executives, like their workers, have equally disparaging remarks about their profession.
Thus the stage is set for the 1970 film THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, based on the John Le Carre novel of the same name. Although not one of his better stories, the movie version accentuates its problems without highlighting its better portions.
The difficulty in bringing Le Carre's novels to the screen is that his characters are by design all cold and unlikable. This requires great skill on the director's part to stage it in such a way that the story becomes compelling. THE LOOKING GLASS WAR's director, Frank Pierson, shows little adroitness in his compositions. The awkward knife fight sequence between the spy John Avery and a new recruit named Leiser (Christopher Jones), for example, looks embarrassingly amateurish.
Arguably the only motivation to view the movie is the chance to catch Anthony Hopkins, whom his fans probably think was never young, playing in one of his first movie roles. His ragged acting lacks polish, but you can glimpse the beginning of his talent and charisma.
"We had scruples, but we overcame them," one of the of spy masters tells John when he questions the whole purpose of the risky mission. He doesn't think the missiles, which they are about to risk a life for to find out about, even exist.
The story spends most of its time in petty spy squabbles with little actual intrigue. The characters are little more than stick figures, and the performances are all shallow, even that of Hopkins.
The director seems incapable of composing a compelling scene. Typical of the picture is the sequence in which John and Leiser sit drunk in the rain and slowly draw pictures with chalk on the wet sidewalk. Even the staging of the scene of Leiser sneaking across the border under the barbed wire should have been filled with tension but instead we get little more than tedium. The film, mainly devoid of music, could have been helped greatly by more of it.
The story's thesis seems to be that intelligence work is boring, but doing that without making the movie be so is a tricky proposition and a trap into which this movie sinks like quicksand.
THE LOOKING GLASS WAR runs 1:46. The picture is not rated but would be PG-13 for mature themes, implied sex, semi-nudity, and some violence and would be fine for kids around ten and up.
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