#Len Deighton

[novlr]

[davidhudson]

Happy 95th, Len Deighton.

[randomberlinchick]

More important than what I'm wearing to the opera is what I'm planning to read during my train journey and in those fabulous Kaffeehäuser. Y'all know how I feel about John le Carré, but Len Deighton also has a special place in my heart. So given that I've only read six (out of nine) of the Bernard Samson books, I've decided to end the series on my trip. Very much looking forward to some Cold War espionage! 😎

A pity that I didn't have time to order the hardcover editions, but they would have been too heavy to lug around anyway...

[alanofalltrades]

I'm watching The Ipcress File and within 26 seconds this movie delivers more sensual energy than James Bond films ever could

[audiemurphy1945]

Billion Dollar Brain(1967)

[theblackestofsuns]

[ivovynckier]

John Barry's theme for the spy movie "The Ipcress File".

[tunasaladonwhite]

[nebraskaenergy]

Police State Britain: the Sky Grows Darker

So some poofters in Britain and the EU think they are so very elite that they can threaten to arrest an American citizen in the United States for violating their fascist hate speech laws. Well, nothing new under the sun then, in a document published by Tom Jefferson, after opening with the words, “When in the course of human events…” he wrote “ He has combined with others to subject us to a…

[giftideasfromaycaramba]

During the revolutionaries' arduous march through the rain forest (with its powerful metaphor of entropy and decay), nature, chance and human ineptitude inexorably claim their victims

[abs0luteb4stard]

W A T C H I N G

[zmkccommonplace]

Bravery is just the knack of suppressing signs of your own fear.

Len Deighton, Yesterday’s Spy

[randomberlinchick]

"She must be the only little girl in the world who hasn't discovered that you fell in love with yourself a long time ago, and will never be unfaithful."

[torchlitinthedesert]

Len Deighton wanted to cast the Beatles in the movie version:

"...Bertrand Russell mentioned the Beatles to me, saying that they wanted to make an 'anti-war film' and wanted me to produce it...

"Paul McCartney came and we devoured the vast curry, drank beer and talked and talked until the small hours of the morning. I was writing and producing Oh! What A Lovely War. To create a narrative I had made the central characters into the Smith Family and the four Beatles could have fitted into this role. But understandably, they wanted to have their own music and their own lyrics. The two projects just wouldn't fit together and, although Paul and I hoped that we could do something together at some future date, we never did."

John and George using their musical going days to cast Victor Spinetti for AHDN. ❤

[jimkeeley]

Musu the Brewcat by Jim Keeley Via Flickr: Waredaca Brewing Company Laytonsville, Maryland

[antoine-roquentin]

Watching Funeral in Berlin, the second film in an attempt to adapt the alright series of books by Len Deighton into a competitor with James Bond but less absurd and more realistic. It's from 1966, and what strikes me most is how (spoiler alert) the Holocaust is portrayed more as another old world atrocity among peoples of Europe rather than the typology of evil seen in movies even a mere decade later like Marathon Man and Boys from Brazil. Even after a big budget hit film like Exodus, being too concerned about the Holocaust in this era was seen as a sign of being too emotional and not able to deal among the squabbling tribes of Europe.

To an extent, that view traces its way back to Roosevelt doing peace negotiations between Russia and Japan in 1905 and the way the press covered the efforts by Woodrow Wilson's Peace Note and Henry Ford's Peace Ship to do the same. Europe was a land of atrocities and coming to America meant you had to forget all that and leave it in the past, whether you had fled the British in the 1840s, the Tsar in the 1890s, the Turks in the 1910s, or the Nazis in the 1940s. You were American now and had to assimilate.

However, in 1967 Israel beat the two proxies of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, Syria and Egypt, and suddenly the order came down for the film industry to switch views and promote a more pro-Israeli line, which is why on the one hand why our films since are less ambivalent about killing Nazis like the above and more like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but on the other hand just goes to show the extent to which Hollywood rules are laid from the top down.