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are_youreadyNow, if you know me somewhere other than Dreamwidth, then you know that I have... mixed feelings... about adaptations of le Carre novels. "Unadaptable" is the word I'd use to describe most of his books, and the only adaptation that I've seen that's good because it's faithful to the source, rather than being good for other reasons, is the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People Miniseries from 1979 and 1982. And even those are not completely faithful; they sacrifice a lot of George Smiley's characterization, and the intricate relationship networks in the book, to preserve the overall spirit. And that's not to mention how half the dialog (especially in Tinker Tailor) is just people quoting paragraph long excerpts of the books at each other; those miniseries are incredible as both adaptation and as art, but they don't make very good television if you haven't read the books.
But I do enjoy many adaptations of le Carre's work. They're often not very good adaptations, either because they don't understand the spirit of the work or simply throw the source material out the window. But they can be good movies, tv series, radioplays nonetheless. At best, works like these add to the source material, suggesting sides of characters we've never seen, or other ways the chips could have fallen had things been a little different.
One such adaptation is The Deadly Affair (1966), which is an extremely loose adaptation of Call for the Dead, with the notable change of not technically starring George Smiley, Peter Guillam, or Ann Smiley: due to issues with copyright related to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), these characters' names are changed to Charles Dobbs, Bill Appleton, and Ann Dobbs. There are a lot of other changes, but we'll dig into those in a moment.
Now, if you were to ask someone what book is John le Carre's masterpiece, they would probably give you one of three answers: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or A Perfect Spy. I'm going to go ahead and toss out Spy Who as a candidate: it's a good book, and it made him famous, but it's a rocky, amateurish novel, lacking a lot of the depth, realism, and character complexity which makes his other work good. Control is a supervillainous sociopath, Mundt is the same, Leamas is a hard-boiled soldier with a heart of gold and no real aspersions cast upon his masculinity or his character. It's a very romantic idea of how the world works, one which does not tend to prevail in le Carre's other novels, and one which make Spy Who far less interesting than it could be.
So, the contest is between Tinker Tailor and A Perfect Spy. If we're saying that a masterpiece is the pinnacle of an artist's career, the one thing he's spent his life striving towards, the logical conclusion of his body of work, then of course that would be A Perfect Spy. I think this is fairly self explanatory, but I'll give a bit of exposition anyway: the brutal honestly of the autobiographical aspects of A Perfect Spy was something le Carre had been taking baby steps toward for years, and a lot of the tensions that had thrummed under the surface of all his previous work burst to the surface in A Perfect Spy. It's also his most literary novel.
But if a masterpiece is not the logical conclusion of a body of work but rather the best example of that body, the best illustration of what le Carre does well, and what only he can do... I would argue Tinker Tailor fits the bill better. A Perfect Spy may be a fantastic book, but although it takes the rest of his work to its logical conclusion, it isn't actually very much like the rest of his work. If my first experience with le Carre was A Perfect Spy, and I wanted more works in that vein, the only even remotely similar book he has is The Little Drummer Girl, and even The Little Drummer Girl is more like the rest of his work than it is like a Perfect Spy. (I am not dignifying Absolute Friends with a mention here because it absolutely, if you'll excuse me, does not deserve it). Whereas Tinker Tailor is an example not just of good writing in general but of le Carre at his best: tragic, satirical, sympathetic, tortured, poetic, loving, vicious, inexpressible; deeply interested in his characters and their moral and emotional struggles, unwilling to cede an easy moral victory even to characters who win an inevitable material one, using the barebones plot of the simplest thriller but hanging an intricate web of shadowed relationships and unspeakable emotions around those bones until the bones don't matter at all.
So I would say that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, at least arguably, le Carre's masterpiece. And in this essay I will explain how said masterpiece is partly based on a loose adaptation of another of his own novels.
The main differences between The Deadly Affair and Call for the Dead, besides the names that were changed for copyright purposes, are the roles of Dieter Frey and Ann Smiley.
First, Ann. In the novel, she was absent. She and George divorced in 1947, two years after they married, and she left England for Cuba with a new man. George kept a candle for her until 1958, after the events of Call for the Dead, when they saw each other again for the first time in eleven years (or were implied to; the novel ends before she appears, and in the next, A Murder of Quality, she is still absent, with no mention of why this is true). In the film, this is untrue; Ann and George are still living together, something we never see in a le Carre novel. The only one where they even try is The Honorable Schoolboy. Ann doesn't even appear in any of the novels until Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
More notably, Ann's infidelity is treated as habitual, chronic, a natural part of her personality, and something she doesn't really like about herself. In Call for the Dead, Ann's perspective isn't really considered. She's also not unfaithful in the same vague way; she left him, and he's angry about it, but she isn't portrayed as habitually promiscuous but continually returning. That characterization doesn't appear until Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In The Deadly Affair, Ann has a weeping breakdown, wishing George would be less forgiving of her. In Tinker Tailor, she develops "the guilts," and "when he [i]s gentle with her, she fend[s] him off." In The Deadly affair, George and Ann, together, excuse Ann's infidelity as an addiction, whereas in Call for the Dead, Ann is portrayed as much more of a malicious actor. The addiction framing doesn't really come up until The Karla Trilogy (it's kind of implicit in Tinker Tailor, but it's explicit in Smiley's people when Ann calls George on the phone).
In the film, George cares for Ann despite her infidelity. He and she try (fail, but try) to solve this problem together. This characterization doesn't really show up until Tinker Tailor. In Call for the Dead, George thinks mostly about how angry he is at Ann, even when he considers giving her things he is angry that she has such a hold on him. In Tinker Tailor, by contrast, he thinks about how Bill's greatest sin is breaking Ann's heart. George's feelings towards Ann in Tinker Tailor are much closer to the feelings he has in The Deadly Affair than they are to the feelings he has in Call for the Dead (and no, this isn't because they metamorphosed in the intervening books; in A Murder of Quality, Ann's main role is to humiliate George by making him the subject of gossip among aristocrats, and how he feels about her as a person doesn't really come up. She isn't mentioned at all in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and her only mention in The Looking Glass War is a one line dirty joke).
It's also relevant that in The Deadly Affair, Ann is significantly younger than George, and foreign (her actress is Swedish, but her nationality is not stated, and I'm not an expert in European accents). In the books, one of Ann's most important characteristics is her English aristocratic status, and if you consider timelines, she's unlikely to be more than a decade younger than George, and I at least tend to read her as about his age. However, the fact that she isn't those things also impacts Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, if in a roundabout way. Put a pin in this for now.
Now, on to the rather more important difference: the characterization of Dieter Frey. In the book, he is a far away figure. He lives in George's memory. He was a student, an agent, a friend, but he stayed in East Germany after WWII, and George expects never to see him again. George also knows that Dieter is not only a socialist, but would in the end rather align himself with the Soviets than the Americans, and does not blame him for this, really. The tragedy of Call for the Dead is that George and Dieter had to cross paths as professionals at all, it is not that Dieter is working against George.
In The Deadly Affair, However, Dieter lives in Switzerland, and drops by for lunch a few times a year. George has no idea he is working for East German Intelligence, he thought Dieter's spy career ended with World War II. Dieter is not a distant, romantic figure of the past, but a man George can hug, and share jokes with, and drink with. Dieter claims that his socialism relented after the war, when he went into business.
It's also relevant that Dieter has less... difference, in the film. In the novel he is Jewish, disabled, loved, hated, iconoclastic, charismatic, beautiful, abrasive, fiery. He's a very distinct figure, George romanticizes him as one of a kind, out of proportion. Whereas in The Deadly Affair he is just... a dear friend, without all the romantic traits. He is charming, and brilliant, but there is no talk of his abrasiveness or his activism. He blends in far more with the people around him. In the book, George decides not to recruit Dieter because Dieter is so flamboyant and outspoken, not to mention Jewish, and the fact that he was recruited was more chance than anything else. George thinks of his intelligence talent as resting on a double bluff: he sticks out like such a sore thumb that no one would ever suspect him. This isn't mentioned in the film, but one can assume it isn't true. In the film, Dieter is far more ordinary. What outstanding qualities he has (looks, charm, intelligence) don't bother or shock anyone; instead they simply make him likable and well-respected.
In the book, George knows that Dieter is his enemy from the moment he discovers that Dieter is involved. It's tragic, but such is life. This is the traditional mode of a le Carrean tragic friendship: I am on one side of the Iron Curtain, you are on the other, isn't it tragic that this pointless war must set brother against brother. But in the film, Dieter's Communist loyalty is a twist. He is a friend, and nothing more, and his reveal as an agent of East German intelligence is a betrayal.
The plot of The Deadly Affair is affected by these changes. The shape of the mystery around the Fennan Case remains unchanged, but on top of that, there is a subplot where Dieter has an affair with Ann, while George and Dieter maintain a complexly amicable relationship. At the end of things, it transpires that Dieter was using the affair to keep tabs on George.
If you are familiar with the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you see where I'm going with this.
Ladies, gentlemen, those that lieth betwixt: In The Deadly Affair (1966), Dieter Frey plays the role of Bill Haydon.
Le Carre lifts so much of Bill's characterization from this movie it's almost funny. Right down to the fact that Bill and Ann are parallels of each other: just as Bill and Ann are aristocrats, cousins, so Ann and Dieter are both younger than George and foreigners in the Deadly Affair. After George discovers the affair in Tinker Tailor, Bill shows "uncharacteristic deference" to George; in The Deadly Affair, George figures out that Dieter is sleeping with Ann because he is too courteous, kissing her on the hand instead of the cheek. And of course, much of Dieter's characterization and plotline that I've already discussed is clearly recognizable in Bill Haydon.
Even images unrelated to Dieter are lifted from the film; in Tinker Tailor, George discovers Bill and Ann's affair because he walks into his own house and Bill is there, and the fact that the gramophone is playing is emphasized. In The Deadly Affair, there is a suspenseful scene where George walks into his own house and the gramophone is playing, and Peter Guillam (in the film named Bill Appleton) is there.
This wouldn't be the only time le Carre has taken inspiration from an adaptation of his own work; it's well known that the reason George was Like That in Smiley's People is because le Carre was inspired by Alec Guinness's rendition of the character. But this is much more whole cloth; The Deadly Affair introduced many more new elements than Alec Guinness's Smiley, and le Carre collected those he liked like a literary magpie.
Interestingly enough, though, parts of Dieter not present in the film are present in Tinker Tailor; while in general much more like film Dieter, Bill is portrayed as flamboyant and iconoclastic in a way that's more consistent with book Dieter. His time at university is emphasized like book Dieter's. His death is also closer to book Dieter's: in the film, George kills Dieter is what amounts to a murder. He pushes him into the river and stamps on his fingers. In the book it's ambiguous. There is a struggle, Dieter falls, George is instantaneously horrified. More importantly, in the book, a lot of emphasis is placed on Dieter having the chance to kill George and not taking it, because he remembered their friendship. In Tinker Tailor, we don't see Bill's death, which means it's left inherently ambiguous. But he chose to meet Jim, and the possibility that Bill's death was a mercy killing or even a sort of suicide is very much left on the table. This is a lot closer to the ambiguity of Dieter's book death.
Now, this fact about Dieter Frey and Bill Haydon explains some stuff. There are some aspects of Bill's character that are hard to explain from a Watsonian perspective, but if he's based on film Dieter, have a perfectly sound Doylist explanations.
Mainly, the relationship between Bill and George is... odd. It's kind of implied that George has always hated Bill, or at least, disliked him. There was professional respect between them, yes, but George "never trusted looks" (at least according to Connie). Bill is talked about as brilliant, but his brilliance is iconoclastic, sexy, impulsive, over the top, and not at all George's speed. Bill is not, in fact, book Dieter; Dieter was always loud and flamboyant, but careful and rational as well, in a way not true of Bill.
But Bill's betrayal would make more... emotional sense, if he were George's friend. The way it's handled, them still socializing with each other, Bill still visiting George's house, George's near-breakdown when he is proved to be the mole... It's all treated as though George and Bill were better friends than they seem to have been.
Where has George's friendship with Dieter gone?
Le Carre is a master of the absent character. People who never speak a line in the text are often extremely emotionally important to the protagonists. Call for the Dead has two: Ann, living her life, as far as Smiley knows, in Cuba, carefree and not thinking of George, at least until he gets her letter, and Dieter, tragically torn away from George and positioned against him by the wretched Cold War. Tinker Tailor has three: Ann, off limits as they both process the fallout of her affair with Bill, Control, dead but leaving his ghost hanging over the entire Circus, and finally, Karla, unknown, hated, befriended, half a world away making unknown moves. (Bill could, arguably, be an absent character as well, but he's a lot more present than the other three, who are practically mythological in George's mind).
George's friendship with Dieter has been transferred from one absent character to another.
In this essay, I argue that the emotional arc of George and Karla's relationship matches with Magnus Pym and Axel H.'s, and that's true. But it also matches with George and Dieter's. Dieter is also the man, his relationship with George follows basically the same friendship-betrayal-start of darkness-revenge outline. The friendship aspect is important, maybe the most important, because it's the aspect that makes the least sense. George invents in his mind a deep, heartfelt connection with a stranger. This is weird as hell and there's a lot you can make of it. Actually, I would say that a pretty good Watsonian reading might be that Karla reminded George of Dieter. But from a Doylist perspective, which is where we are, Karla is very much providing the friendship that Bill isn't.
It's arguable whether Karla's presence is reasonable to consider influenced by the film, and not just the book, especially since if I had to trace one chain of self-influence, I would say it goes from Dieter Frey through Jens Fiedler to Karla, but the fact that Karla picks up Bill's slack as George's beloved friend is enough to at least weave him into this tapestry.
The friendship is somewhere else, too. Jim takes George's place. As I've mentioned, it's Jim who kills Bill. It's Jim whose love Bill betrays. Jim plays the role of the George to Bill's Dieter: they knew each other at university, they worked together, they were dear to each other. Bill and Jim are almost a rewrite of George and Dieter where le Carre is more sure of who's right: the same tragedy, but Jim is far more secure in his loyalties and his conservative English ideas than George ever was, and Bill is much more obviously despicable than Dieter.
However, if I'm going to talk about the parallels between Bill and Jim and Dieter and George, I am going to have to address the fact that le Carre did choose to make Bill and Jim's relationship explicitly romantic.
Now, Call for the Dead is a le Carre novel, and it's an early one at that. Some degree of homoeroticism is simply to be expected. Every description of Dieter is horny; George talks about "his beauty," calls him "commanding," a "genius," and an "idol," obsesses over not "get[ting] Dieter out of perspective" or thinking of him as too "romantic," while later quietly admitting to himself that Dieter is in fact a larger than life, romantic figure; when other people talk about Dieter they use words like "elegant" and "Byronic," and nearly every person who encounters him is awed by him somewhat. There's no doubt that Dieter is very sexy, and this is fundamentally homoerotic because that sexiness is filtered through George's perspective. George finds him at least a bit sexy.
But George and Dieter's relationship in Call for the Dead is no Teddy and Sasha. You could waltz through the whole book, and depending on what sort of reader you are, you could totally just not notice the homoerotic elements of George and Dieter's relationship. This is simply not true in the movie. The Deadly Affair wants you to pay attention to George and Dieter's relationship, and there is an unmistakable erotic undercurrent to it. In the first scene where Dieter appears, George and Dieter spend almost the entire five and a half minutes touching each other. Casually gripping each other's shoulders, touching each other's faces, resting their hands on each other. Every time they sit, they sit as close together as possible. I'm a very tactile person, but I can think of two people outside my blood family I would be comfortable behaving the way they do with, and I've kissed both of them on the mouth with tongue.
More importantly, the dialogue is pretty unambiguously ambiguous. Look at these lines from immediately after Dieter leaves, when George realizes Dieter and Ann are having an affair:
I would call that intentional coding, not the kind of accidental or carry-over-from-the-book subtext that one might expect to find in this movie. It sounds like a line from BBC Sherlock.
At this point, it feels meaningless to point this out, because the horse i'm beating has started to collect flies, but there's also the aspect of the titular affair itself. That was added by the movie, and well. In the style and genre le Carre and this movie work in, sharing a woman is often tantamount to, in the words of Orville-J.-Rourke-Call-Me-Jay, "shar[ing] each other."
So, there is an intentional and pretty unmissable homoerotic component to George and Dieter's relationship in The Deadly Affair, stronger than the one in Call for the Dead. The fact that le Carre chose to acknowledge that this dynamic is present in the film by writing it into Tinker Tailor is interesting. I'm not sure what it means, but it's interesting.
Tinker Tailor is, at its essence, held up by four emotional pillars: George's relationship with Ann, George's relationship with Control, George's relationship with Karla, and Jim's relationship with Bill. George's relationship with Ann is deeply influenced by The Deadly Affair, and so, arguably, is George's relationship with Karla. Bill and Jim's relationship is practically an analog of George and Dieter's in some ways. The fact that three of the four emotional pillars of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are related somehow to The Deadly Affair, well.
It's interesting.
By the by, if you want to watch the film, there's a bad pirated version here, but if you have three dollars and don't mind funnelling them to Jeff Bezos, I'd recommend renting it on Amazon; the pirated version is fucking unwatchable.
EDIT: I found a better pirated version.
Side notes that strengthen my argument but didn't fit comfortably into my main body, since they concern mostly side characters and trivialities:
1. Bill Haydon also seems to be partly based on Call for the Dead/The Deadly Affair Guillam, especially since Guillam is named Bill in the movie, but since Guillam is not meaningfully different between the book and the movie, it's not as relevant to my argument to discuss this. But Bill's mannerisms and speech are extremely reminiscent of Guillam's, and the friendly condescension he shows George is very similar, if more malicious when coming from Bill. I should add that the Peter Guillam of Call for the Dead and The Deadly affair is almost a completely different character than the Peter Guillam of Tinker Tailor, being smarter, more cool headed, more obviously upper class, and George's equal rather than his protege.
2. Roy Bland's "As a good socialist I'm going for the money. As a good capitalist, I'm sticking with the revolution, because if you can't beat it spy on it" speech is lifted in spirit, if not actually in letter, from this banter-y exchange in The Deadly Affair:
But I do enjoy many adaptations of le Carre's work. They're often not very good adaptations, either because they don't understand the spirit of the work or simply throw the source material out the window. But they can be good movies, tv series, radioplays nonetheless. At best, works like these add to the source material, suggesting sides of characters we've never seen, or other ways the chips could have fallen had things been a little different.
One such adaptation is The Deadly Affair (1966), which is an extremely loose adaptation of Call for the Dead, with the notable change of not technically starring George Smiley, Peter Guillam, or Ann Smiley: due to issues with copyright related to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), these characters' names are changed to Charles Dobbs, Bill Appleton, and Ann Dobbs. There are a lot of other changes, but we'll dig into those in a moment.
Now, if you were to ask someone what book is John le Carre's masterpiece, they would probably give you one of three answers: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or A Perfect Spy. I'm going to go ahead and toss out Spy Who as a candidate: it's a good book, and it made him famous, but it's a rocky, amateurish novel, lacking a lot of the depth, realism, and character complexity which makes his other work good. Control is a supervillainous sociopath, Mundt is the same, Leamas is a hard-boiled soldier with a heart of gold and no real aspersions cast upon his masculinity or his character. It's a very romantic idea of how the world works, one which does not tend to prevail in le Carre's other novels, and one which make Spy Who far less interesting than it could be.
So, the contest is between Tinker Tailor and A Perfect Spy. If we're saying that a masterpiece is the pinnacle of an artist's career, the one thing he's spent his life striving towards, the logical conclusion of his body of work, then of course that would be A Perfect Spy. I think this is fairly self explanatory, but I'll give a bit of exposition anyway: the brutal honestly of the autobiographical aspects of A Perfect Spy was something le Carre had been taking baby steps toward for years, and a lot of the tensions that had thrummed under the surface of all his previous work burst to the surface in A Perfect Spy. It's also his most literary novel.
But if a masterpiece is not the logical conclusion of a body of work but rather the best example of that body, the best illustration of what le Carre does well, and what only he can do... I would argue Tinker Tailor fits the bill better. A Perfect Spy may be a fantastic book, but although it takes the rest of his work to its logical conclusion, it isn't actually very much like the rest of his work. If my first experience with le Carre was A Perfect Spy, and I wanted more works in that vein, the only even remotely similar book he has is The Little Drummer Girl, and even The Little Drummer Girl is more like the rest of his work than it is like a Perfect Spy. (I am not dignifying Absolute Friends with a mention here because it absolutely, if you'll excuse me, does not deserve it). Whereas Tinker Tailor is an example not just of good writing in general but of le Carre at his best: tragic, satirical, sympathetic, tortured, poetic, loving, vicious, inexpressible; deeply interested in his characters and their moral and emotional struggles, unwilling to cede an easy moral victory even to characters who win an inevitable material one, using the barebones plot of the simplest thriller but hanging an intricate web of shadowed relationships and unspeakable emotions around those bones until the bones don't matter at all.
So I would say that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, at least arguably, le Carre's masterpiece. And in this essay I will explain how said masterpiece is partly based on a loose adaptation of another of his own novels.
The main differences between The Deadly Affair and Call for the Dead, besides the names that were changed for copyright purposes, are the roles of Dieter Frey and Ann Smiley.
First, Ann. In the novel, she was absent. She and George divorced in 1947, two years after they married, and she left England for Cuba with a new man. George kept a candle for her until 1958, after the events of Call for the Dead, when they saw each other again for the first time in eleven years (or were implied to; the novel ends before she appears, and in the next, A Murder of Quality, she is still absent, with no mention of why this is true). In the film, this is untrue; Ann and George are still living together, something we never see in a le Carre novel. The only one where they even try is The Honorable Schoolboy. Ann doesn't even appear in any of the novels until Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
More notably, Ann's infidelity is treated as habitual, chronic, a natural part of her personality, and something she doesn't really like about herself. In Call for the Dead, Ann's perspective isn't really considered. She's also not unfaithful in the same vague way; she left him, and he's angry about it, but she isn't portrayed as habitually promiscuous but continually returning. That characterization doesn't appear until Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In The Deadly Affair, Ann has a weeping breakdown, wishing George would be less forgiving of her. In Tinker Tailor, she develops "the guilts," and "when he [i]s gentle with her, she fend[s] him off." In The Deadly affair, George and Ann, together, excuse Ann's infidelity as an addiction, whereas in Call for the Dead, Ann is portrayed as much more of a malicious actor. The addiction framing doesn't really come up until The Karla Trilogy (it's kind of implicit in Tinker Tailor, but it's explicit in Smiley's people when Ann calls George on the phone).
In the film, George cares for Ann despite her infidelity. He and she try (fail, but try) to solve this problem together. This characterization doesn't really show up until Tinker Tailor. In Call for the Dead, George thinks mostly about how angry he is at Ann, even when he considers giving her things he is angry that she has such a hold on him. In Tinker Tailor, by contrast, he thinks about how Bill's greatest sin is breaking Ann's heart. George's feelings towards Ann in Tinker Tailor are much closer to the feelings he has in The Deadly Affair than they are to the feelings he has in Call for the Dead (and no, this isn't because they metamorphosed in the intervening books; in A Murder of Quality, Ann's main role is to humiliate George by making him the subject of gossip among aristocrats, and how he feels about her as a person doesn't really come up. She isn't mentioned at all in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and her only mention in The Looking Glass War is a one line dirty joke).
It's also relevant that in The Deadly Affair, Ann is significantly younger than George, and foreign (her actress is Swedish, but her nationality is not stated, and I'm not an expert in European accents). In the books, one of Ann's most important characteristics is her English aristocratic status, and if you consider timelines, she's unlikely to be more than a decade younger than George, and I at least tend to read her as about his age. However, the fact that she isn't those things also impacts Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, if in a roundabout way. Put a pin in this for now.
Now, on to the rather more important difference: the characterization of Dieter Frey. In the book, he is a far away figure. He lives in George's memory. He was a student, an agent, a friend, but he stayed in East Germany after WWII, and George expects never to see him again. George also knows that Dieter is not only a socialist, but would in the end rather align himself with the Soviets than the Americans, and does not blame him for this, really. The tragedy of Call for the Dead is that George and Dieter had to cross paths as professionals at all, it is not that Dieter is working against George.
In The Deadly Affair, However, Dieter lives in Switzerland, and drops by for lunch a few times a year. George has no idea he is working for East German Intelligence, he thought Dieter's spy career ended with World War II. Dieter is not a distant, romantic figure of the past, but a man George can hug, and share jokes with, and drink with. Dieter claims that his socialism relented after the war, when he went into business.
It's also relevant that Dieter has less... difference, in the film. In the novel he is Jewish, disabled, loved, hated, iconoclastic, charismatic, beautiful, abrasive, fiery. He's a very distinct figure, George romanticizes him as one of a kind, out of proportion. Whereas in The Deadly Affair he is just... a dear friend, without all the romantic traits. He is charming, and brilliant, but there is no talk of his abrasiveness or his activism. He blends in far more with the people around him. In the book, George decides not to recruit Dieter because Dieter is so flamboyant and outspoken, not to mention Jewish, and the fact that he was recruited was more chance than anything else. George thinks of his intelligence talent as resting on a double bluff: he sticks out like such a sore thumb that no one would ever suspect him. This isn't mentioned in the film, but one can assume it isn't true. In the film, Dieter is far more ordinary. What outstanding qualities he has (looks, charm, intelligence) don't bother or shock anyone; instead they simply make him likable and well-respected.
In the book, George knows that Dieter is his enemy from the moment he discovers that Dieter is involved. It's tragic, but such is life. This is the traditional mode of a le Carrean tragic friendship: I am on one side of the Iron Curtain, you are on the other, isn't it tragic that this pointless war must set brother against brother. But in the film, Dieter's Communist loyalty is a twist. He is a friend, and nothing more, and his reveal as an agent of East German intelligence is a betrayal.
The plot of The Deadly Affair is affected by these changes. The shape of the mystery around the Fennan Case remains unchanged, but on top of that, there is a subplot where Dieter has an affair with Ann, while George and Dieter maintain a complexly amicable relationship. At the end of things, it transpires that Dieter was using the affair to keep tabs on George.
If you are familiar with the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you see where I'm going with this.
Ladies, gentlemen, those that lieth betwixt: In The Deadly Affair (1966), Dieter Frey plays the role of Bill Haydon.
Le Carre lifts so much of Bill's characterization from this movie it's almost funny. Right down to the fact that Bill and Ann are parallels of each other: just as Bill and Ann are aristocrats, cousins, so Ann and Dieter are both younger than George and foreigners in the Deadly Affair. After George discovers the affair in Tinker Tailor, Bill shows "uncharacteristic deference" to George; in The Deadly Affair, George figures out that Dieter is sleeping with Ann because he is too courteous, kissing her on the hand instead of the cheek. And of course, much of Dieter's characterization and plotline that I've already discussed is clearly recognizable in Bill Haydon.
Even images unrelated to Dieter are lifted from the film; in Tinker Tailor, George discovers Bill and Ann's affair because he walks into his own house and Bill is there, and the fact that the gramophone is playing is emphasized. In The Deadly Affair, there is a suspenseful scene where George walks into his own house and the gramophone is playing, and Peter Guillam (in the film named Bill Appleton) is there.
This wouldn't be the only time le Carre has taken inspiration from an adaptation of his own work; it's well known that the reason George was Like That in Smiley's People is because le Carre was inspired by Alec Guinness's rendition of the character. But this is much more whole cloth; The Deadly Affair introduced many more new elements than Alec Guinness's Smiley, and le Carre collected those he liked like a literary magpie.
Interestingly enough, though, parts of Dieter not present in the film are present in Tinker Tailor; while in general much more like film Dieter, Bill is portrayed as flamboyant and iconoclastic in a way that's more consistent with book Dieter. His time at university is emphasized like book Dieter's. His death is also closer to book Dieter's: in the film, George kills Dieter is what amounts to a murder. He pushes him into the river and stamps on his fingers. In the book it's ambiguous. There is a struggle, Dieter falls, George is instantaneously horrified. More importantly, in the book, a lot of emphasis is placed on Dieter having the chance to kill George and not taking it, because he remembered their friendship. In Tinker Tailor, we don't see Bill's death, which means it's left inherently ambiguous. But he chose to meet Jim, and the possibility that Bill's death was a mercy killing or even a sort of suicide is very much left on the table. This is a lot closer to the ambiguity of Dieter's book death.
Now, this fact about Dieter Frey and Bill Haydon explains some stuff. There are some aspects of Bill's character that are hard to explain from a Watsonian perspective, but if he's based on film Dieter, have a perfectly sound Doylist explanations.
Mainly, the relationship between Bill and George is... odd. It's kind of implied that George has always hated Bill, or at least, disliked him. There was professional respect between them, yes, but George "never trusted looks" (at least according to Connie). Bill is talked about as brilliant, but his brilliance is iconoclastic, sexy, impulsive, over the top, and not at all George's speed. Bill is not, in fact, book Dieter; Dieter was always loud and flamboyant, but careful and rational as well, in a way not true of Bill.
But Bill's betrayal would make more... emotional sense, if he were George's friend. The way it's handled, them still socializing with each other, Bill still visiting George's house, George's near-breakdown when he is proved to be the mole... It's all treated as though George and Bill were better friends than they seem to have been.
Where has George's friendship with Dieter gone?
Le Carre is a master of the absent character. People who never speak a line in the text are often extremely emotionally important to the protagonists. Call for the Dead has two: Ann, living her life, as far as Smiley knows, in Cuba, carefree and not thinking of George, at least until he gets her letter, and Dieter, tragically torn away from George and positioned against him by the wretched Cold War. Tinker Tailor has three: Ann, off limits as they both process the fallout of her affair with Bill, Control, dead but leaving his ghost hanging over the entire Circus, and finally, Karla, unknown, hated, befriended, half a world away making unknown moves. (Bill could, arguably, be an absent character as well, but he's a lot more present than the other three, who are practically mythological in George's mind).
George's friendship with Dieter has been transferred from one absent character to another.
In this essay, I argue that the emotional arc of George and Karla's relationship matches with Magnus Pym and Axel H.'s, and that's true. But it also matches with George and Dieter's. Dieter is also the man, his relationship with George follows basically the same friendship-betrayal-start of darkness-revenge outline. The friendship aspect is important, maybe the most important, because it's the aspect that makes the least sense. George invents in his mind a deep, heartfelt connection with a stranger. This is weird as hell and there's a lot you can make of it. Actually, I would say that a pretty good Watsonian reading might be that Karla reminded George of Dieter. But from a Doylist perspective, which is where we are, Karla is very much providing the friendship that Bill isn't.
It's arguable whether Karla's presence is reasonable to consider influenced by the film, and not just the book, especially since if I had to trace one chain of self-influence, I would say it goes from Dieter Frey through Jens Fiedler to Karla, but the fact that Karla picks up Bill's slack as George's beloved friend is enough to at least weave him into this tapestry.
The friendship is somewhere else, too. Jim takes George's place. As I've mentioned, it's Jim who kills Bill. It's Jim whose love Bill betrays. Jim plays the role of the George to Bill's Dieter: they knew each other at university, they worked together, they were dear to each other. Bill and Jim are almost a rewrite of George and Dieter where le Carre is more sure of who's right: the same tragedy, but Jim is far more secure in his loyalties and his conservative English ideas than George ever was, and Bill is much more obviously despicable than Dieter.
However, if I'm going to talk about the parallels between Bill and Jim and Dieter and George, I am going to have to address the fact that le Carre did choose to make Bill and Jim's relationship explicitly romantic.
Now, Call for the Dead is a le Carre novel, and it's an early one at that. Some degree of homoeroticism is simply to be expected. Every description of Dieter is horny; George talks about "his beauty," calls him "commanding," a "genius," and an "idol," obsesses over not "get[ting] Dieter out of perspective" or thinking of him as too "romantic," while later quietly admitting to himself that Dieter is in fact a larger than life, romantic figure; when other people talk about Dieter they use words like "elegant" and "Byronic," and nearly every person who encounters him is awed by him somewhat. There's no doubt that Dieter is very sexy, and this is fundamentally homoerotic because that sexiness is filtered through George's perspective. George finds him at least a bit sexy.
But George and Dieter's relationship in Call for the Dead is no Teddy and Sasha. You could waltz through the whole book, and depending on what sort of reader you are, you could totally just not notice the homoerotic elements of George and Dieter's relationship. This is simply not true in the movie. The Deadly Affair wants you to pay attention to George and Dieter's relationship, and there is an unmistakable erotic undercurrent to it. In the first scene where Dieter appears, George and Dieter spend almost the entire five and a half minutes touching each other. Casually gripping each other's shoulders, touching each other's faces, resting their hands on each other. Every time they sit, they sit as close together as possible. I'm a very tactile person, but I can think of two people outside my blood family I would be comfortable behaving the way they do with, and I've kissed both of them on the mouth with tongue.
More importantly, the dialogue is pretty unambiguously ambiguous. Look at these lines from immediately after Dieter leaves, when George realizes Dieter and Ann are having an affair:
George: "Do you love him?"
Ann: "It's very easy to love Dieter."
George: "Well, we both of us know that.
I would call that intentional coding, not the kind of accidental or carry-over-from-the-book subtext that one might expect to find in this movie. It sounds like a line from BBC Sherlock.
At this point, it feels meaningless to point this out, because the horse i'm beating has started to collect flies, but there's also the aspect of the titular affair itself. That was added by the movie, and well. In the style and genre le Carre and this movie work in, sharing a woman is often tantamount to, in the words of Orville-J.-Rourke-Call-Me-Jay, "shar[ing] each other."
So, there is an intentional and pretty unmissable homoerotic component to George and Dieter's relationship in The Deadly Affair, stronger than the one in Call for the Dead. The fact that le Carre chose to acknowledge that this dynamic is present in the film by writing it into Tinker Tailor is interesting. I'm not sure what it means, but it's interesting.
Tinker Tailor is, at its essence, held up by four emotional pillars: George's relationship with Ann, George's relationship with Control, George's relationship with Karla, and Jim's relationship with Bill. George's relationship with Ann is deeply influenced by The Deadly Affair, and so, arguably, is George's relationship with Karla. Bill and Jim's relationship is practically an analog of George and Dieter's in some ways. The fact that three of the four emotional pillars of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are related somehow to The Deadly Affair, well.
It's interesting.
By the by, if you want to watch the film, there's a bad pirated version here, but if you have three dollars and don't mind funnelling them to Jeff Bezos, I'd recommend renting it on Amazon; the pirated version is fucking unwatchable.
EDIT: I found a better pirated version.
Side notes that strengthen my argument but didn't fit comfortably into my main body, since they concern mostly side characters and trivialities:
1. Bill Haydon also seems to be partly based on Call for the Dead/The Deadly Affair Guillam, especially since Guillam is named Bill in the movie, but since Guillam is not meaningfully different between the book and the movie, it's not as relevant to my argument to discuss this. But Bill's mannerisms and speech are extremely reminiscent of Guillam's, and the friendly condescension he shows George is very similar, if more malicious when coming from Bill. I should add that the Peter Guillam of Call for the Dead and The Deadly affair is almost a completely different character than the Peter Guillam of Tinker Tailor, being smarter, more cool headed, more obviously upper class, and George's equal rather than his protege.
2. Roy Bland's "As a good socialist I'm going for the money. As a good capitalist, I'm sticking with the revolution, because if you can't beat it spy on it" speech is lifted in spirit, if not actually in letter, from this banter-y exchange in The Deadly Affair:
George: "Veering to the right, at last?"
Dieter: "As the money comes in, a little further to the right than when you first knew me. I am a socialist capitalist."
