THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1984) Warner Archive

I can understand Warner Media’s motives for releasing director, George Roy Hill’s turkey-lurkey-quirky, wet noodle of a spy thriller, The Little Drummer Girl (1984) to Blu-ray now. Given the present tensions between Israel and Palestine, to say nothing of this weekend’s latest assault on Israel from Iran, the subject matter here should be timelier than ever. Again, as I said – I understand the studio’s motives. Respecting them, however, takes some effort. For although The Little Drummer Girl is based on a riveting best-seller by noted espionage/thriller novelist, John Le Carré, any similarity between that page-turner and this heavily-gutted stab at finessing Le Carré’s tangled tale into a two-hour-plus potboiler ends almost from the moment the main titles meld into the body of the piece. Thoughtlessly abridged by screenwriter, Loring Mandel, who takes it on advice the general public either (A) has a deep-rooted grasp/interest in the conflict, or (B) have actually read Le Carré’s spell-binding prose, Mandel’s shoe-horn Triptik through the highlights yields to a gumbo of false starts and clumsily introduced/then, indiscriminately jettisoned characters, dealt the same homogenized verve and voracity it takes to handcraft a matzah ball.   

The perfunctory exposition is faulty, in the way Mandel believes it is enough merely to link characters to story - none to be distinguished in a moment or scene that might otherwise set them apart. There is another problem to be addressed here. Le Carré’s novel favored the terse, yet oddly empathetic Chief of Israel Intelligence, Martin Kurtz (played with disastrously ineffectual ennui by Klaus Kinski). As Kinski is not ‘star material’, the movie settles on Le Carré’s female protagonist instead, the American actress seconded to the cause, Charlie (woefully miscast with Diane Keaton). It’s an understandable misfire, as Keaton, by 1984, had proven her mettle; first, as the original kooky muse to Woody Allen’s offbeat reflections on New York society, but also, dramatically, in pictures like 1972’s The Godfather (and its sequels), ‘77’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and ‘81’s Reds. So, the breadth of Keaton’s talent had been explored elsewhere and to excellent effect. Alas, Keaton’s Charlie, despite having a decade up on the book’s Charlie (Keaton was 36. Charlie is supposed to be 26.) never comes off as anything better than a simpering mess of contradictions.  And Yorgo Voyagis as Charlie’s paramour, Joseph, is atrociously, no help at all – relegated to scenes where he shoots the occasional panged expression, meant to be digested by the audience as legitimately conflicted empathy for the gal playing a deadly game as their double agent. The awe-inspiring efficiency and eloquence in Le Carré’s authorship, to have evolved the aforementioned so vividly, is, instead, rendered lethally leaden and out of touch on the screen.

Where the novel was lengthy, yet involving, the movie is merely tedious and disenchanted with anything beyond bottling the ends to make head or tails of it all. Having emasculated Le Carré’s plunging and pivoting emotional intensity, we are left with characters who seem to move around a gigantic chess board under the sway of someone else’s design, reacting to circumstances beyond any of their control. How much can we blame the actors for having a forty-ouncer plot poured into a shot glass of character development? Plenty. These are, at least so we have been led to believe, solid talents (in one case, a star), tested elsewhere and risen to the challenge, even when more ashes than angels are left at their disposal. But here, everyone just seems to be doing the bare minimum to get the job done.  Diane Keaton, alas, is too mature, too stable, and too altruistic in her motives to be considered the messy tart, dumped into an international affair, almost by accident in Le Carré's novel. As for Klaus Kinski; his Kurtz is a cutout goon from central casting, gutted of Kurtz’s ancestry and acumen.

Globe-trotting between Europe and the Middle East, The Little Drummer Girl begins in earnest with the Mossad's covert efforts to draw out Khalil (Sami Frey), a PLO bomber; first, by kidnapping, then murdering his brother, Michel (Moti Shirin) while he is on a lecture circuit, addressing Palestinian empathizers in a ski mask. Charlie is in the crowd, and later, lured to Greece because of her anti-Zionist sympathies, on the pretext of filming a wine commercial. Instead, almost immediately she is met and seduced by Joseph, who tricks Charlie into believing he is Michel. Charlie is then kidnapped to a safe house run by the Israeli Mossad where she meets Kurtz, his right-hand, Litvak (Eli Danker) and other contributing members, who recruit and manipulate Charlie into believing she is serving ‘the cause’ of Palestinian liberation. Arriving at the bombed-out resistance headquarters of a Palestinian leader, Tayeh (Michael Cristofer) Charlie begins to train for their guerrilla maneuvers at a secret desert encampment. For clarity, Tayeh explains the PLO are not anti-Semitic, rather anti-Zionist – a very fine line of distinction. At first, Tayeh advises Charlie to go home. However, when she sacrifices one of her own, Tayeh believes Charlie’s motives are pure.

Now, working as a double agent under the Mossad’s watchful eye, Charlie impersonates Michel’s girlfriend to ingratiate herself to Khalil. She is given an aggressive interrogation by Helga (Kerstin De Ahna). But then, Khalil and Charlie set out to detonate a briefcase bomb Charlie faithfully delivers to its intended target, Professor Minkel (Shimon Finkel). Already awaiting her arrival, Kurtz has his men hastily remove the device out of range before it goes off to convince Khalil, Charlie has served her purpose. Even so, Khalil is mistrusting, confiscating Charlie’s radio (actually a homing device) and removing its batteries. Alarmed by the sudden loss of the signal, Joseph and Kurtz storm Khalil’s home where they discover Charlie and Khalil in bed together. Khalil is brutally assassinated, his blood splattering all over a frantic Charlie. Other Mossad agents lay waste to Khalil’s remaining entourage, including Helga and Mesterbein (David Suchet, thoroughly wasted herein). In the desert, the Palestinian guerrilla camp is bombed to smithereens by Israeli jet fighters. Whisked away to an Israeli hospital, Charlie is psychologically shattered by the experience, knowing she has been used by the Mossad to assassinate every Palestinian she ever knew. Returning to England a short while later, Charlie is unable to resume her acting career. She is met by Joseph who, emerging from the darkened shadows of the empty theater, implores Charlie to reconsider his love for her. She resists. Nevertheless, the couple walks off together, out of the theater, and into the night – their future together, uncertain.

The Little Drummer Girl is a thoroughly wasted opportunity to take one of Le Carré’s most involved and absorbing novels and transform it into a strictly paint-by-numbers affair, with all the creativity and style stripped out of its character development. Director, George Roy Hill is so intent on giving us every last scene depicted in the book, he forgets that movies – generally speaking – work better when economizing plot and distilling a weighty roster of supporting players down to a few key characters, humanized to their fullest effect. Did we really need Smadar Brener as Toby – Michel’s gal/pal, the assassin whom we briefly see delivering a handmade bomb to the home of Ben Ami (Yossi Werzansky), during the movie’s James Bond-like opener, but who then virtually vanishes from the story, until she winds up dead alongside Michel in his red Mercedes? Was it essential to establish Charlie, in her previous life as a not-terribly-successful stage actress, having a male suitor, Al (played by Bill Nighy) who keeps getting his knickers in a ball every time Charlie turns him down? Was there any genuine suspense to be gleaned from an overwrought surveillance sequence taking place in a German town square over one full day and night, where Charlie, after being instructed by Kurtz to leave the car keys in its tailpipe, is momentarily distracted by a nondescript blonde stud (Jeff Lester) who is, in fact, a red herring, having absolutely nothing to do with this espionage?

The answer to all of the above is an unqualified ‘no’. This is valuable screen time squandered on diversions in lieu of any real effort on George Roy Hill’s part to establish a mounting sense of dread, fear and loathing among this tighter-knit group of protagonists working against the clock to etch out the highlights of Le Carré’s sinister thriller. All over the map, in more ways than are effective, either at close range or from a distance, The Little Drummer Girl lacks the narrative impetus of a well-crafted cloak and dagger to carry us over the threshold into Le Carre’s more darkly purposed labyrinth of ideals.

The Warner Archive (WAC) debuts The Little Drummer Girl on Blu-ray. It’s not an altogether successful hi-def presentation. Shot pseudo-documentary style by cinematographer, Wolfgang Treu, image quality toggles between crisply executed close-ups, revealing impressive amounts of fine detail, and, long and medium shots that are soft and slightly out of focus at best, with a total absence of clarity and fine detail, and, overall anemic contrast. At least the light smattering of film grain appears as the most indigenous part of this master. Colors are wan. Truthfully, there is not a lot of opportunity for flashy splashes or emboldened hues. The palette favors a mostly brown/beige cast. Flesh tones are accurately represented. And age-related artifacts have been eradicated. The DTS 2.0 mono is adequate, but just. This is an insignificant aural experience with dialogue, score (by Dave Grusin) and SFX all landing in an undistinguished middle register. The only extra here is a trailer that, if possible, is even more unimpressive than the movie. Aside: I thought trailers were supposed to ‘sell’ a movie?!? Bottom line: not a great film. At times, not even a good one. The Blu-ray is average at best. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1