If I ask you to name a movie spy, surely the first one that comes to mind is James Bond. But the repertoire of spies that have populated the screens is very diverse, from the agent with almost superheroic powers of action and seduction to the gray guy who listens and records other people’s conversations in a gloomy basement. The Caixaforum dedicates the exhibition Top Secret, cinema and espionage to this universe. Organized by the French Cinemateque, in its Spanish version – in Madrid until October 22 and then it will travel to Barcelona – native references have been added. The exhibition is a good opportunity to trace a journey through the genre, related to the police, but with its own characteristics.
In literature there are some novels from the 19th century that could be considered pioneers –A Dark Affair, by Balzac, for example–, but it is in the first decades of the 20th century when the genre develops, with titles such as The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, adapted for film by Hitchcock. Then Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Grahame Greene, Len Deighton, John Le Carre will arrive… It is no coincidence that they are all British, because that is where literary spies flourished.
From literature they jump to the cinema and already in the silent period there are relevant films such as Spione by Fritz Lang. However, it is Alfred Hitchcock –British, of course– who lays the foundations of spy cinema and shapes it throughout his career: The Thirty New Steps, Sabotage, The Secret Agent, Alarm on the Express, Envoy special, the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, In Chains, With Death on His Heels, Torn Curtain, Topaz… Other relevant titles from the classical period also contribute to outlining the aesthetic of chiaroscuro, tension and moral ambiguity typical of the genre: The Ministry of Fear by Fritz Lang, Five Tombs in Cairo by Billy Wilder, Operation Cicero by Mankiewicz, The Third Man by Carol Reed, Istanbul by Norman Foster and Orson Welles…
And then James Bond comes along and changes everything. Spies enter the pop era. Ian Fleming, who was an intelligence officer during World War II, embodied in his character the desire for adventure that he did not experience in real life (his work was in the office, he selected objectives for the commandos that operated on the land). And he also projected his sexual fantasies onto Bond. He published the first novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, followed by another eleven and a couple of volumes of short stories. The character jumped to the cinema in 1962, with Agent 007 against Dr. No, starring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress, who emerged from the Caribbean waters like a modern Venus in an image that has become iconic.
Bond –six decades on the bill and twenty-seven films, if we count the two not produced by EON, the company created by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli– is a sociological mirror that allows us to see the evolution of society over more than half century. From the hypervirility of hair on the chest of the beginnings (an old-fashioned reaffirmation of masculinity in the face of emerging feminism), through the self-irony and infantilization that Roger Moore gives him, to the stage of Daniel Craig, in which he becomes more complex when character with chiaroscuro and is placed before the mirror of the current world, turning it into a kind of dinosaur out of its habitat. There is another interesting aspect of Bond: the gadgets that Q invents for each mission, inspired by real spy gadgets (some are shown in the exhibition, like a cigarette pack that hides a micro-camera).
James Bond was a mass phenomenon. As such, it gave rise to imitations, plagiarism, rehashes, pastiches and parodies. In his wake emerged Flint (James Coburn), Matt Helm (Dean Martin), Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) or the French OSS 117 (played by various actors and later parodied by Jean Dujardin). Among the rehashes, the stupendous Spanish production by Antonio Isasi Isasmendi, Estambul 65 (with several scenes shot in Barcelona) stands out. There were also intellectual and avant-garde pastiches like Godard’s Lemmy vs. Alphaville, and parodies like the Italian James Tont with Lando Buzzanca or the television Super Agent 86 by the great Mel Brooks (and much later Austin Powers). The geekiest product: a series of Filipino Z-movies starring a dwarf actor named Weng Weng, baptized Agent 003 ½ because of his height (if this is already offensive, I won’t even tell you what the movies are like, in which they threw at poor actor as if he were a stuffed toy). TV series like Mission Impossible and The Man from UNCLE were also inspired by Bond, later made into movies (and let’s not forget the British The Avengers, which was a year ahead of Bond). And modern sagas like Jason Bourne’s belong to this same family.
Bond also had his female counterpart in Modesty Blaise, from a comic and played by Monica Vitti. A pop film with highbrow airs shot in Swinging London in 1966 by Joseph Losey. They say that Vitti’s husband, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, was dying of jealousy because the male partner was the seductive Terence Stamp, and he went by the filming every day, since he was also in London preparing Blow Up. female spy – from Mata Hari to Red Sparrow – tends towards the femme fatale, although sometimes that profile is just a protective facade. She has been starred in by actresses such as Greta Garbo (Mata Hari) and Marlene Dietrich (Fatality of Joseph von Sternberg). A singular case is that of Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian who succeeded in Hollywood and participated in some spy films –Comrade X–, but she also developed a parallel career as an inventor. She, together with the composer George Antheil, created a frequency hopping system in the middle of World War II that was used by the military as a guide for torpedoes and is considered a precedent of Wi-Fi. Another actor, the British Leslie Howard, served as a spy for his country and died in 1943 when the plane in which he was returning from Lisbon to London was shot down by German fighters.
This brings us to the real spies, running through the entire history of the 20th century. His role was crucial in World War II (The Man Who Never Was, the documentary Garbo: Edmond Roch’s Spy, Deciphering the Enigma…) and later in the Cold War (films like Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and series like Un Spy Among Friends, about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, based on the book by Ben Macintyre). Cinema has also explained the creation and operation of the CIA, MI6, KGB and Mossad (the first is portrayed in Robert de Niro’s The Good Shepherd and the Mossad in Munich by Spielberg or in Sacha Baron Cohen’s series The Spy, about the Israeli Eli Cohen, who managed to infiltrate the Syrian political leadership). Later, the spies have fought against terrorism (the series The Looming Tower deals with the errors that allowed the attacks on the Twin Towers; its fictional version would be Homeland). And also for the control of secret information in cyberspace (Oliver Stone’s Snowden).
Authors such as Greene and Le Carre created their fictions on this real basis. In the antipodes of Bond, the protagonist of Our Man in Havana by the former is a gambler who invents the information that happens, while Le Carre’s Smiley is a character with an official air who plays complex strategic games with his enemies from an office. . Perhaps the person most real spies are most like is the protagonist of The Lives of Others, that Stasi agent who watches over a couple suspected of opposing the communist regime and ends up snooping into his privacy. In the end, the spy is a voyeur, a sniffer of other people’s lives.
