![]() ![]() In this century, le Carré has exercised increasing control over adaptations of the novels, serving as executive producer on John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (2001) and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011). Even that dismal final sequence (in which bent bureaucrats get a measure of comeuppance) in director Fernando Meirelles’ wonderful The Constant Gardener (2005) is a game of cricket compared with the book. ![]() Most of the novels end, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, with “a conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” or else in something approaching tragedy. ![]() Le Carré’s plots, meanwhile, stymie certain easy conventions of the cinema of espionage his novels may not be as “unfilmable” as Tristram Shandy, but the challenges remain steep. Christie was an enormous commercial success as a playwright, and her novels move with the rhythms of film, and the screenwriter’s work is therefore quite simple. (As it happens, 23 is also the number of extant James Bond movies.) This modest smattering of le Carré adaptations makes a certain sense. About half of Agatha Christie’s 66 mystery novels received a film treatment, whereas only eight of John le Carré’s 23 novels have made it to the big screen. ![]()
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