Five best films based on le Carre novels

I’ve spent much of my reading life trying to figure it out: What is it about the work of John le Carre that draws me back to his books again and again?

Le Carre (real name, David Cornwell), a former British spy turned best-selling novelist, is a master plotter — but so is Arthur Conan Doyle. He’s a marvelous creator of dialogue — but so is Elmore Leonard. He is darkly hilarious in that dry, British manner — but so are any number of contemporary English novelists.

My humble conclusion: It’s the themes of loyalty and betrayal at the core of le Carre’s work that have made some of his stories tales for the ages. It’s so human to want to belong heart and soul to something, whether it’s a person, a family, an institution or a country. Le Carre’s novels portray the cost of letting loyalty blind you to the truth, and often the truth is very hard indeed.

Most of le Carre’s books have been made into movies. Skipping over the lesser productions (“The Looking Glass War,” “The Little Drummer Girl”), here’s a shortlist of the best films and TV shows made from le Carre’s books, all available on DVD. Not so coincidentally, most feature le Carre’s George Smiley, a British bureaucrat in the spy service whose bland bespectacled facade masks a passionate intellect, a broken heart and a sixth sense for betrayal that eventually sees through every kind of deceit.

Will the new version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” starring Gary Oldman earn a spot on this list of favorites? We shall see.

“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965): I am old enough to remember the fuss when this movie came out — its bleak view of the spy trade shocked an American audience steeped in the West-good, Soviets-bad polemics of the Cold War.

Shot in black and white, “Spy” tells the story of a burned-out British spy, Alec Leamas, who is sent to East Germany to sow disinformation. But his entanglement with an idealistic young woman makes him begin to doubt the wisdom and morality of his mission. Richard Burton, a ’60s heartthrob because of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, showed his chops as an actor with his gritty, depressing and realistic portrayal of the tormented Leamas. George Smiley (Rupert Davies) plays a secondary role as Leamas’ handler.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979): This six-episode miniseries, made for the BBC, has been hailed by many as some of the best television ever made. The expanded format allowed a full exposition of le Carre’s labrynthine plot.

Based on the first book of le Carre’s “Karla” trilogy, “Tinker, Tailor” features Alec Guinness as Smiley, who is brought back out of retirement and charged with ferreting out a mole in British intelligence. As Smiley investigates, he confronts the service’s moral and strategic failures and finds his own loyalties shaken to the core.

In a 1999 Seattle Arts & Lectures appearance, le Carre told the audience that Guinness’ Smiley entered his head and wouldn’t leave: “I had my character stolen by Alec Guinness. His voice and mannerisms entered my soul — to the extent that I didn’t know if I could finish the trilogy,” he said.

“Smiley’s People” (1982): The third book in le Carre’s “Karla” trilogy (after “The Honourable Schoolboy”) became another BBC miniseries (six episodes). It again starred Guinness and concludes the titanic struggle between Smiley and Karla, his archenemy in East German intelligence, who ran the British mole and seemed to know Smiley better than he knew himself. Patrick Stewart has a brief but unforgettable nonspeaking scene as Karla.

“A Perfect Spy” (1987): The BBC miniseries version of le Carre’s finest novel after “Tinker, Tailor” is almost as devastating as the 1986 novel, which Philip Roth called “the best English novel since the war” when it came out. The seven-episode series portrays the disintegration of Magnus Pym, a British spy recruited by Axel, a Czech student he met (and betrayed) as a young man. Axel has become an operative in Czech intelligence (at that point Czechoslovakia was a Soviet puppet regime) and enlists Magnus as a double agent, to spy on his own country.

Magnus’ character and moral compass have been forever distorted by his relationship with his con-man father. The relationship between the spy Pym and his scoundrel father, Rick Pym, is highly autobiographical — le Carre’s father was a confidence man whose escapades had a profound impact on le Carre’s upbringing and outlook. Peter Egan stars as Magnus and le Carre had a hand in the screenplay.

“A Murder of Quality” (1991): I recently rediscovered this adaptation of le Carre’s second novel. Though he doesn’t quite approach the gravitas of Alec Guinness’ characterization, Denholm Elliott is still marvelous as Smiley, a self-effacing little man and the butt of jokes about his wife’s unfaithfulness, whose bland exterior masks a dogged determination to get to the bottom of things.

When Smiley is asked by a friend to investigate the death of a faculty wife at Carne, a boy’s prep school, he digs into a pile of class conflict, blackmail and town vs. gown resentment. Le Carre wrote the screenplay, and a young Christian Bale plays a prep-school student who knows more than he oughta.