in the gap
by Douglas Messerli
Harold Pinter (screenplay, based on
a novel by Trevor Dudley Smith) Michael Anderson (director) The Quiller Memorandum / 1966
After witnessing the murder of a supposed British agent in a Berlin
street that looks like it was filmed on a dramatically lit sound-stage—the
small phone booth in which the agent is shot is as lit up from within as the
glowingly poisonous cup of milk delivered up by Carey Grant to Joan Fontaine in
Hitchcock’s Suspicion—we are quickly
transferred to the London headquarters of the British Secret Service, where its
director, Gibbs (George Sanders) is dining with head agent Pol (Alec Guinness),
a scene which immediately reveals Pinter’s comic intentions: asked by Gibbs if
the food is all right, Pol answers, “Rather good.”
Gibbs: What is it?
Pol: Pheasant
Gibbs: Well, that should be good.
And this film, indeed, is good, despite the director’s apparent
incomprehension of what a radical work it truly is. Throughout this film, Pol
is seen constantly eating or about to dine, a kind of perfect metaphor for the
Secret Services’ apparent hunger for their enemies, and a hunger for all they
might consume.
The enemy this time round is a group of resurgent Nazis, although of a
new breed, far more dangerous than the brown shirts simply because they’re so
very hard to recognize. An American-born agent has been asked (“I’ve been asked
to say this is not an order, but a request,” says Pol, adding “I’ll give you
five minutes.”) to replace the dead agent in the attempt to find out who they (the enemy) are, and where they are hiding.
Strangely enough, the writer presents nothing to explain what these evil
men are accomplishing in contemporary German society, or on what grounds they
might be destroyed if agent Quiller (George Segal) is able to sniff them out.
It is simply a given that they are villains and Quiller, playing a laconically
witty gumshoe, the absurd hero. Yet it is this very lack of any real evidence
that these Nazi followers have done anything except secretly claim their awful
namesake along with our growing doubts of Quiller’s competency to out them that
permits Pinter’s script to so easily merge good and evil, so that by film’s end
we hardly know who represents the Neo Nazis and who the British Service.
Throughout much of the film, Quiller appears as a kind of wisecracking
incompetent—after escaping from a Nazi interrogation, Quiller is described by
Pol as “sleepwalking”; Quiller replies “I’m alive anyway,” to with Pol
sarcastically quips, “Oh that’s nice to know.” His activity seems to be less
that of a spy than a simple voyeur.
Trying to sniff out the Nazis in a local
men’s pool, Quiller describes himself to the pool’s manager as an American
coach checking out the facilities. Told that he cannot stay as an observer,
Quiller dryly replies, as the camera follows the bodies of the fit German
swimmers, “What a pity, I’d hope I’d been able to watch.” Shortly after,
speaking to a young teacher to whom he has been introduced as someone who might
be able to answer his questions about contemporary German society, Quiller
spends more time talking about seemingly unrelated incidents than attempting to
probe for information, describing to her Joe Lewis’ win of the second match
against German boxer Max Schmeling (“Germans are a great disappointment in the
boxing sense.”), indicative, perhaps, of his “watch and wait” attitude.
Little by little, we come to recognize that this Berlin is not so much
the German city tourists visit, but a village of the mind, a paranoid’s world
in which everyone is watching everyone else, and all are trying to guess each
other’s next move and intentions. Pol describes Quiller’s role and position
quite vividly. Placing two muffins at either end of a grape, he tells Quiller
at another of his luncheon feasts:
You’re on a delicate mission.
Let me put it this way. There are two opposing
armies drawn up on the field.
There is a heavy fog between them. Of course
they want to see one another’s
position very much. You are in the gap. Your
mission is to signal their
position, but if in signaling that position you signal
our position they will gain a
heavy advantage. That’s where you are, Quiller,
in the gap.
[Pol picks up the grape and
puts it into his mouth.]
By the end of this tale, we truly no longer know who is good or who is
bad, what is accidental or what is intentional. As the Nazis release him,
holding the young teacher, Inge Lindt, as hostage, Quiller is followed down the
same street we have seen in the first scene by a legion of other men. In one
delirious moment, as the American agent crosses a small bridge, we see scores
of others trailing behind, as if he were a pied-piper of spies leading them
to—well there is only one direction to go, to his death.
This is, after all, still a commercial movie, and that death is only a
spiritual one; discovering a bomb under a car which the other side has planted
as his vehicle of escape, Quiller blows the car up and hides nearby.
Reporting to headquarters, Quiller
announces the location of the Nazi leader, Oktober, who, with his henchman, is
quickly rounded up and taken off to justice—whatever that might mean in such a
morally relativistic world.
And the young schoolteacher, held as
hostage? Quiller finds her back in the school room, quite safe. She has, she
reports, been lucky: “They let me go.”
It is clear that she, herself, has been
one of Nazi group.
Quiller: We got all of
them. Well, not all of them perhaps. Most
of them.
And shortly after, we warns her of
the future she must face: “If I ever get back to Berlin, I’ll look you up.”
This brilliant fable of moral incertitude seems quite insightful given
today’s global context where Americans have been transformed from saviors into
torturers, from Cold War heroes, to brutal men shooting down everyday citizens
with guns.
Los Angeles, July 4, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2008).
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