The Little Drummer Girl

The great British spy novelist John le Carré was no stranger to having his complex, densely-plotted novels adapted for the screen, but up until this point, it was usually the small screen. That's because sprawling multi-character novels like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are far more suited to a BBC miniseries than a feature-length film. The major exception was Le Carré's third novel, the international best-seller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. That book was brilliantly adapted by Martin Ritt, Paul Dehn, and Guy Trosper into a film that was as much a character study, featuring one of Richard Burton's greatest performances, as it was a tale of Cold War espionage. Director George Roy Hill, along with screenwriter Steve Tesich, made one of the greatest adaptations of a lengthy novel in his prior film, The World According to Garp. Here, he takes less artistic license with perhaps a too-faithful adaptation, at least in terms of plot, of The Little Drummer Girl. Screenwriter Loring Mandel carefully follows the events and details of Le Carré's novel but without the benefit of the author's distinct prose.

The film follows an American actress (Diane Keaton) who is forcibly recruited by Israeli intelligence to pose as the girlfriend of a Palestinian bomber’s dead brother in an operation to neutralize PLO leaders. In the book, the titular character is an anti-Zionist English actress in the vein of Vanessa Redgrave, though Le Carré based his titular protagonist more on his half-sister, a young actress with radical political views. Many balked at the supposedly commercial decision to change the main character from English to American and took Hill to task for the casting of Keaton, who didn't seem either political enough or like the type of actress who would be selected for a mission of this ilk. For once, I have to agree with the critics of that day when it comes to casting complaints for 1984 movies. Keaton feels entirely out of her depth in ways that run counter to the ways her character, Charlie, is out of her depth. Watching the movie, we wonder what it might have been like with, say, Jane Fonda in the lead role, especially when Charlie starts dressing like a soldier and training at a Palestinian guerrilla camp.

The rest of the cast is strong, especially the great German star Klaus Kinski in an atypically cool and collected performance as the Mossad leader, and Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis as the smooth operator who recrutes Charalie. But the film is dealt a fatal blow by the miscasting of Keaton, who just feels awkward and out of place in almost every scene, whether she's performing scenes on a London stage, lying to the Mossad when they first bring her to their safehouse, or trying to convince the PLO operatives that she's a legit ally. She's most convincing in the romantic scenes, yet she lacks the level of carnality that this part calls for. There are lots of well-scripted, well-directed sequences, but they only achieve suspense without providing much depth or insight into the political backdrop on which the story plays out, something that one would not say about any of John le Carré's novels. This film was my first introduction to the great author, and it did not make me wanna run out and read one of his books—The Spy Who Came in from the Cold took care of that. The Little Drummer Girl was more recently adapted by the great South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook into an acclaimed 2018 mini-series with Florence Pugh in the lead. I must say, I'm as curious to see that as I am to reread this great novel.