The Little Drummer Girl (1984)

The novel by John Le Carré is the best spy novel ever written. It is a work of pure genius and it elevates the genre to literature. Daniel Silva has made a career of out basically borrowing everything from this book for his Gabriel Allon series.Forget about the fact that she's a terrible actress but Diane Keaton is just too old for the part. Charlie was a very young and hip woman, not a middle-aged dork...and she was English. She isn't even hot enough for the role. In the movie she's obviously too old for the Arab terrorist Michel who she was supposed to be involved with. Yorgo Voyagis as Joseph was also a little too old for the part and he is just too much of a Rock Hudson lookalike for my tastes. The best bit of casting was Klaus Kinski as Kurtz.If ever a movie needs to be remade it would be this excellent story.

John Le Carre is the master of the spy novel. His stories, including this one, are more into the psychology of the characters than to violence and action. The film is a faithful rendition of the novel. Charlie, an actress, is "recruited" by the Israeli equivalent of our CIA, to cast a net to catch a terrorist. Her role will be to get close to the terrorist by claiming to be the girlfriend of the terrorist's brother. She is pro-Palestinian, so will she play along or not? Does she even want to get involved? It is not obvious as to why Charlie chooses as she does. I think that while she supports the Palestinian cause, she does not condone their bombings. Later, when she gets to know the terrorist responsible for the bombings, she is swayed back towards favoring the terrorists, but perhaps not all the way back. As typical with spy stories, characters are not always who they seem to be, but it isn't that difficult to follow. The only character whose true identity is in question is Charlie, and that is partly the role she is asked to play in the plot and partly her ambivalence and uncertainty as to what she should do.Diane Keaton is excellent as Charlie, and the rest of the cast are also terrific.

Professional intelligence case workers appeal to four principal motives to recruit their agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise (meaning blackmail), and Ego, sometimes referred to by the acronym MICE. In THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL, we see a fifth motive used: Screenwriter's Fiat.Charlie, a little pro-Palestinian Jane Fonda wannabe, is kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad, humiliated, and offered the job of spying on Palestinian terrorists. She accepts because, um, because, well, the screenwriter says so. Okay, so there's a vague effort to make us believe that Charlie's in love with one of the Mossad agents, but since her attraction to him was based entirely on the belief that he was a romantic, dashing leader of the Palestinian `revolution,' there's no basis for her to continue being attracted to him once she learns he's a spy for the Israelis whom she hates. I'm not sure any woman in the world is quite so easily manipulated as Charlie in this movie. If such a woman really exists anywhere, why on earth would anyone want her as an intelligence agent? Anyone who can be convinced to change sides that easily once can surely be convinced to do so a second time. You wouldn't dare let her out of your sight for ten seconds, and as for allowing her to join a Palestinian terrorist training camp, where she'd be out of sight and in the presence of her old friends for months on end, forget about it. It's absurd. If I were politically correct, I would call it a misogynist movie, but that would probably be unfair. There's no evidence that director George Roy Hill imagined Charlie's weakness and stupidity to be typical of all women.It's a shame that Charlie is neither a believable nor a likeable heroine, because in every other respect THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a great spy movie. I can't say precisely how realistic it is technically, but it feels authentic at every turn. The brutal interrogations of the captured terrorist, and the intense multilayered surveillance of Charlie ring very true. There's no one-man-army James Bond crap here; the Israelis assign a full squad of spies to every job. More importantly it gives us the psychological feel of the espionage profession. The stock in trade of professional spies is the betrayal of loyalty and the abuse of friendship. Naturally, this does not make for likeable characters, however much one may admire the cause for which they work. Hill does not attempt to sugarcoat this; he shows it to us as it is.Diane Keaton should not be blamed for failing to make her ridiculous character convincing; she is clearly doing the best she can, and quite probably the best that anyone could have. Klaus Kinski steals every scene he gets as Mossad master agent Marty Kurtz. David Suchet gets a fine small role as a terrorist thug.THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a fine example of how outstanding supporting performances, dedication, and sincerity (you rarely find movies this honest in Hollywood anymore) can rescue a movie whose protagonist is badly written. It's not half the movie it could have been, but it's a good movie anyway.Rating: **½ out of ****.Recommendation: See it on video or DVD with your friends.

Instead of "rethinking its policies" or "trying to understand the terrorists", the Israeli government, as accurately portrayed in this movie, has developed a novel approach to dealing with fanatical groups that attack civilians: blow them to smithereens!!!!! A truly no-nonsense film, with some beautiful Mediterranean locations, the Little Drummer Girl does come off as somewhat cheap in the technical sense (a larger budget could've ensured some truly dazzling action scenes, and lessened the dependence on dragged-out dialogue). Still, the authentic depiction of Mossad antiterrorism techniques (surveillance, baiting, seizure, interrogation, assasination) more than compensated for the occasionally low-budget climate. The acting was excellent, and though some may feel Diane Keaton looked too old for her role (a difficult claim to dispute when viewing the Oscar winner's sex scenes), her inadequacies were well concealed by brilliant performances from Yorgo Voyagis, Eli Danker, and Klaus Kinski. One of my favorite lines in the film was when Danker's character, Litvak, asks why they can't just seal off the German town where a bomber is hiding, and Marty Kurtz (Kinski) replies "This isn't the West Bank, Shimon."