The Good Wife 4.10 and Smiley's People

( Spoilery relief is spoilery )

In other tv news, watching some episodes of Alec Guinness playing George Smiley (not in the tv Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but its follow-up, Smiley's People) evoked weirdly contradictory feelings in me. Because on the one hand, you have this chilly Le Carré world in the late 70s (written)/early 80s (filmed), chilly in both the emotional and in the temperature sense, but on the other, those were the years of my childhood and thus I had constant moments of "OMG, I remember those hats/earmuffins! I remember the cars, the hair styles, the cities looking like that!" and feeling warmed. Note: the articifically (and quite well) recreated late 70s of recent films like Argo or of course Tinker, Tailor... did not evoke this Pavlovian nostalgia in me. And I definitely would not want to relive the era. But, you know: that was my childhood. I don't know, maybe it's because Smiley's People was actually made during the period in question and thus has that undescribable something of veracity which the most careful reconstructions don't have? As in, London, Hamburg, Berlin look really run down and not reconstructed as run down but really rather shinily new?

Anyway, Guinness is great in the part, naturally, and since this is the BBC at the start of the 80s, they have a lot of great actors for the supporting roles as well. Including Sian Philipps, the Empress Livia herself, as Ann Smiley, managing in her one and only scene to convey the entire history of their marriage from her pov instead of from his, and also making it understandable why she was, to quote Karla, "the last illusion of an illusion-less man" for so long. Speaking of Karla, trust Patrick Stewart to be awesome even in a silent cameo which consists of him and Alec Guinness staring at each other with great intensity. Of the people who actually had more than one scene and weren't Alec Guinness, I was most impressed by Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhazy (I refuse to write "Esterhase", because that's not how it is spelled, damm it! That's one of the most famous Hungarian family names ever!) . Writing wise, I think this qualifies as quintessential Le Carré in high form, with the morally grey and the crucial twist that the way Smiley finally manages to defeat Karla for good is by using a human, not inhuman action of Karla's against him; using Karla's own methods, essentially conceding what he's denied in their first meeting, that they're the same. And of course there is the incredible bitchiness of every senior official in the Circus ever (the serving in MI6 memories of the quondam David Cornwell can't be fond ones), the constant little digs and put downs, giving Alec Guinness the chance to be stoic and dignified (and subtly ironic) in the face of that, and also making it clear why hanging out with Toby by comparison must be preferable. Toby may be a crook, but he's not into unpleasant bitchery. Oh, and Mario Adorf gets to the most affectionate and sentimental blackmailing Hamburg brothel owner known to fiction. I wonder whether Hamburg took better to Le Carré than Bonn, which he memorably if meanly in A Small Town in Germany described as "half the size of the Chicago Central Cemetary and twice as dead". (Look here, Mister, charming provincialism was just what we needed to detox from the preceding megalomania.) The general pacing is very 70s tv, which is to say sloooooowwwly, but the series has the actors to sell it.