Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

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Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller.

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Viewing the original BBC TV serialisation (1979) of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before watching its 2011 movie version ensures that one knows who the mole is. This has two advantages.

Undistracted by red herrings, one can better assess the screenplay's ability to compress almost five TV hours of dense, albeit slow-paced, drama into two hours of cinema. And compare two generations of British actors (and cameos by two actresses).

After 32 years, the TV serial was a mixed blessing on its BBC DVD. Good value is given by a one-hour documentary extra, The Secret Centre, made in 2000. It includes an interesting set of autobiographical comments by Le Carre, excerpts from the Smiley films, interviews with relevant figures (his ex-wife, college mentor, KGB and East German spymasters), and readings from the books (by Le Carre himself, aka in the real world as David Cornwell). If only more money had been spent on re-mastering the seven TV episodes' fluctuating sound and murky lighting. Their award-winning direction (James Irvin) and cinematography were diminished by the antique film qualities.

Although the serial looked its age, its dialogue rarely sounded dated. It'll be interesting to hear how the 2011 version presents bitter anti-materialist opinions that match those of the current Occupy movement.

It's easy to see how almost redundant characters in Le Carre's plot could have been dropped for the modern movie, including Smiley's nymphomaniac wife (Sian Griffiths), an exasperated schoolmaster (John Wells), a sacked research maestro (Beryl Reid), exasperating ex-spies (Nigel Stock and Joss Ackland) and an eight-year-old schoolboy who's a retired agent's protege (credited as "Duncan Jones", and already looking like the adult film director son of David Bowie, even though Jones's PR reps or IMDb haven't yet wanted to put two and two together).

The discredited spy (Hywel Bennett) who provides information leading to the mole plays a bigger role in the storyboard, too big, seemingly being an excuse both for some overseas location filming in Lisbon and the appearance of a female agent and sexual side-attraction in Le Carre's novel. Le Carre's key KGB maestro, Karla, is seen only as a non-speaking role in a flashback showing Smiley's feeble efforts to turn him (an unrecognisable bearded Patrick Stewart).

Such gratuitous roles were sharp reminders that Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller. The identity of Russia's mole in the British secret service is signposted very early, simply because he's the only one of four possible traitors shown to have relationships with other people. All members of the quartet are stereotypical figures of post-War Britain, the upper class providing a glib bisexual cynic, a pompous fool and an embittered poseur, while the working class was mined for a Communist thug's son holding a technical role in the corridor of power.

Many of them smoked and puffed pipes heavily; that will have to be revised in 2011? And the homosexual overtones (Le Carre's acknowledgment of the characters of two among the "Cambridge Five" spies) might need spelling out even more clearly for modern audiences? If so, the preparatory school setting for another character may well be abandoned for the film to better fit into mainstream US audiences' comfort zone.

The lead characters in the 1979 serial must be the same in 2011. Chief investigator and forcibly retired spymaster Smiley (deadpan Alec Guinness) wasn't as cunning as my memory had expected, while the betrayed spy (close to emotive Ian Bannen) played a larger role than it recalled. The only active brain in the intelligence "Circus" (Ian Richardson) brought his saucer-lidded cup of tea into meetings in a giveaway fashion, just like a disaffected outsider would, and Smiley's aide (Michael Jayston) was too clever and loyal by half to have been allowed to remain in the service.

Although Smiley and his team, and the top civil servant empowering him unofficially, mention concerns about the mole being aware of their activities, his apparent total failure to do so is hard to credit (but may well illustrate the Oxbridge amateurishness of British espionage during the Cold War).

Is the 2011 version a deeper study of intelligence masters at work? Its task is easier, in my eyes, after the relative flatness of the 1979 original.

Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford won her Oscar as Mildred Pierce, the title role in the 1945 Warner Bros adaptation of James M.Cain's novel about a single mother's personal struggles, class-awareness and business success during the Depression. The classic noir film, which added murder to the tale of a disastrous mother-daughter relationship, was part-written by William Faulkner, directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starred young Oscar nominee Ann Blyth as the restaurateur's scheming daughter.

The 2011 remake of Mildred Pierce, directed by co-writer/producer Todd Haynes, was given a great cast including Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, Hope Davis, Evan Rachel Wood as the daughter and Kate Winslet in the title role. Faithful to the novel, to an extreme possible only in a mini-series, the HBO TV saga ran for more than five hours. Is it too much of a good thing?

It's almost impossible to get too much of Winslet, a charismatic actress who's maturing gracefully. Unfortunately, she cannot do evil intent convincingly: her Mildred is incredibly naive, and ludicrously doting on her vile elder daughter. There are moments when Winslet's Mildred is angry, upset and imperious, but never enough to hint at genetic traits that might have produced spitefully egocentric, snobbish and vicious Veda. She can only be viewed as a devil's spawn, because her father is a sweet-natured weak-willed unfaithful building contractor (self-effacing Irish actor Brian F.O'Byrne, probably the miniseries' most likely Emmy winner).

For the first three of the miniseries' five episodes, 14-year-old Veda is played by 11-year-old Morgan Turner, with a hi-falutin accent and prissy airs tolerated to an unbelievable extent by her parents. Only her two music tutors recognise and slap down her conceit.

When her father moves out, at Mildred's insistence, and her young sister dies of flu while their mother is meeting a caddish new beau from the right side of town (Guy Pearce), Veda can dominate Mildred even more, but the script doesn't focus clearly on their generation gap. Instead, Haynes' focal point is Mildred's expanding restaurant and pie-making businesses.

In the 1945 version, Cain's 1930s melodrama was transformed into a murder mystery. It may have been done to satisfy Hollywood codes about evil earning justice, but it also added a strong narrative punch to an otherwise maudlin family tale. Haynes drops the murder (which I really wanted for several lead characters) and finds his visual punches in gratuitously nude love-making scenes. He also indulges in too many long pans and slow tracking shots, flaunting the production's extensive period settings, indoors and out and about in Glendale and Pasadena, crowded scenes of costumed extras, and a frequent parade of chugging vintage cars.

Haynes' Far From Heaven, starring a memorable Julianne Moore as another independent-minded woman of period character, was reportedly an homage to Douglas Kirk's lush directorial style. Mildred Pierce follows suit, apparently, and it is a beauty to behold, but it's a beauty stretched beyond its natural length. To points where the narrative framework is over-exposed and the characters' incredibility is glaring. This Mildred is just a silly mother, not a tragic figure.

Shakespeare retold

Maybe because the BBC reportedly over-pays its senior executives, they sometimes approve hefty funding for great, cute or memorable TV movie productions. Sometimes, those try to be all three, like the Shakespeare Retold 2005 mini-series of four made-for-TV contemporary versions of the bard's plots. One imagined Macbeth set in a Glasgow restaurant's kitchen. The other three were comic efforts, one of which envisaged The Taming of the Shrew as a modern-day rom-com.

Bizarre casting paired short and very shrewish Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, as Kate, a viperous virgin uber-Thatchery MP, and big-framed bumptious Rufus Sewell as Petruchio, a penniless earl wagered into wooing her. Her marriage is required too by party supporters if the spiteful spinster is to get chosen as Leader of the Opposition.

Screen-playwright Sally Wainwright had already been a BAFTA nominee for her work on Yorkshire Television's four-season comedy series At Home with the Braithwaites (200o-2003) and her version of one of Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath, 2003) for the BBC. She'd had what must have seemed an amusing idea for her re-working, which was directed attractively by David (Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper) Richards.

The worthy supporting cast included comedian David Mitchell (as Kate's long-suffering PPS), Jaime (Hustle) Murray as Bianca, a beautiful model sister head over heels for a beautiful Italian teenager, and Twiggy as their mother; Stephen (Drop the Dead Monkey) Tompkinson plays Bianca's manager, harbouring long-unrequited love for her.

The very incredible updated plotline has Petruchio, recently returned from Australia, falling into instant real love for Kate, who agrees within a week to a church wedding, at which her fiancee comes out as a macho transvestite who likes wearing high heels, make-up and a kilt. Not even coolly surreal, and too far from the realities of modern life and politics, the unfunny comedy framework collapses before the pair reach their honeymoon villa and Kate's taming in Italy.

***

Peter Bowker, a multiple BAFTA TV award nominee, and winner for Occupation and Eric & Ernie, had the trickier task of placing A Midsummer's Night Dream in a modern setting. His imaginative interpretation works better. The lovers' wooded fairyland, still ruled by Oberon (Lennie Jericho James) and Titania (Sharon Inspector Linley Small), assisted by unreliable Puck (Dean Lennox Shameless Kelly), is found in Dream Park, a lakeside holiday resort where Theo (Bill Paterson) and Polly (Imelda Staunton) are hosting their daughter's engagement party. Its special highlight is to be a revue organised by camp manager Quince (Simon The Fast Show Day) performed by camp staff, including oafish Norman Bottom (Johnny Benidorm Vegas)

The bride-to-be's best friend and secret lover are Shakespeare's second pair of love victims to be served inattentive Puck's mistaken applications of eyedrops of love juice. Director Ed Fraiman has quick-cut fun illustrating the potion's effect, but repeats the device too many times; the production also adds pop song tracks whose lyrics are over-obvious noisy accompaniments to plot developments.

All ends well enough and sweetly, though the comic revue and audience participation were a lot funnier in the original 16th-Century theatrical romp.

***

Brian Percival's direction of Much Ado About Nothing won him a BAFTA TV award in 2006. He'd won the BAFTA Short Film award for his 2001 About a Girl, and collected another BAFTA TV award in 2011 for his work on ITV's Downton Abbey.

David Nicholls wrote the snappy TV version of Shakespeare's rom-com, in which Beatrice (Sarah Blackpool Parish) and Benedick (Damian Band of Brothers Lewis) are sparring co-anchors on Wessex TV news programme. Hero (Billie Dr Who Piper), its bubbly bright weather girl and daughter of station manager Leonard (Martin By Jeeves Jarvis), is to be married to sportscaster Claude (Tom Eastenders Ellis), but the jealous former visual effects designer Don (Derek No Angels, Ugly Betty Riddell) plots their falling-out.

The delightfully credible lead pair of actors clearly enjoy their frolic, especially an apropos deconstruction and recital of a Shakespearean poem extolling love and marriage. The play's tittle-tattle tale of hate-love passions has been artfully re-hashed by Nicholls, whose non-TV work includes adaptations of his own novels: Starter for Ten (2006, starring James McAvoy) and One Day (2011, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess). It's clear why the BBC chose to run this story first in the four-week mini-series: this is Shakespeare rendered with comic and televisual flair.

***

James McAvoy landed the tile role in the re-working of Macbeth, who's been transformed into the young impassioned sous chef in a top Glasgow restaurant in the noir screenplay devised by Peter (Cambridge Spies) mini-series) Moffat, a multi-award nominee and BAFTA winner for his Criminal Justice mini-series. Joe Macbeth's ambitious wife, Ella (Keeley Spooks Hawes), is the maitre d' for the three-star restaurant, whose absentee owner is a TV celebrity chef, Duncan (Vincent - 300, The Street - Regan). His son, Malcolm, is a long-haired would-be poet and apprentice chef (Toby Dead Man's Shoes, The Street Kebbell.

The Scottish tragic melodrama was given a treatment reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's epic tale of a egocentric chef and his retinue, and director Mark Brozel (award-winning Holy Cross TV movie) followed suit with an artful array of dramatic lighting, raw meat, kitchen knives, gore, garbage and self-consciously well-composed close-ups of Mr and Mrs Macbeth emoting madly.

The one conceit that worked surprisingly well was the transformation of the three witches into a chorus of refuse-disposal bin-men, consoling Macbeth with the thought that his murder of Duncan will only be trouble "when pigs fly", which they do eventually. What didn't work was the concept that the Ghost could be replaced by a macabre Michelin quality inspector.

Another silly idea was corrected before the series was published as a BBC DVD. The original portmanteau title was rightly ditched: ShakespeaRe Told. Will must have groaned in his grave.

Trip, the

It's exciting to watch a movie genre being developed, creating its own standards and challenges. There's one that lacks an officially recognised title so far, but might be named the "biocom" or "reality caper". It fictionalises comedic pseudo-reality in a bogus sitcom-style setting, and has primarily been a TV phenomenon in the past few years.

On TV, the concept has been used by Larry David for Curb Your Enthusiasm in the USA and by Ricky Gervais for Extras in the UK. There were precedents in cinema, where many of Woody Allen's New York-set films featuring his own persona were virtually autobiographical and/or wish fulfillment exercises. Various other comedians appeared in movies framing their stage or TV personalities, and Jim Jarmusch showcased a galaxy of comic actors playing "themselves" in Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), a delightfully mixed bag of short sketches.

Which, by the way, illustrates the movie industry's inability to operate beyond anywhere near as many as six degrees of separation. One of the cleverer sets in the Jarmusch compendium was a two-hander featuring Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina as a pair of English actors at opposite ends of the success scale (Coogan being cast as the top dog, even though he didn't get a big Hollywood breakthrough until the remake of Around the World in 80 Days was released the following year, in 2004).

Back in the UK, Coogan had been best known as TV comic character Alan Partridge since 1994 (a decade after his first TV work consisted of providing impersonations for the Spitting Image animated satire series). His first major movie acting role arrived in 2002, with 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom, already a prolific and prodigious British talent. They worked together again in 2005 on A Cock and Bull Story, a partly-improvised depiction of a movie company attempting to film Laurence Sterne's classic, and supposedly unfilmable, fictional autobiography, Tristram Shandy (co-produced by BBC-TV).

Coogan's comic sidekick as a fellow actor in that movie forerunner of the Extras TV concept was Rob Brydon, a Welsh-born British TV comedian and character actor. (Other special ingredients in Winterbottom's beguiling experimental, mock-period drama included Michael Nyman's music, Marcel Zyskind's cinematography, and Jeremy Northam playing the director.)

A few years later, Coogan, Brydon and Winterbottom joined forces again, and BBC-TV backed their idea of a six-episode, buddy-cum-road-movie sitcom featuring a "Coogan" character commissioned to write newspaper reviews of gourmet restaurants in scenic northern England settings. "Brydon" joins him on The Trip for the meals, driving tour and the pair's love-hate friendly banter. It ticked a bonanza of boxes for an audience-friendly British TV series, blending photogenic cuisine and wry comic personalities, beautiful rural scenery and family dramas, semi-documentary and odd-couple sitcom.

Like The Thick of It, it was an addictive TV series that demanded concentrated viewing; one episode was never enough. Being a sequence of vignettes and sightseeing excursions directed by Winterbottom, it was also an above-average TV production with ravishing shots of exquisitely-plated food, quick-cut shots of each kitchen's chefs at work, and beautifully composed scenes of Yorkshire and Lakeland natural beauty. Every now and then, lines from Lakeland poets were recited, mostly in impersonated actors' voices, with serio-comic local history footnotes used as material for comic set-pieces and inter-play.

Ben Smithard was the series' very note-worthy cameraman, and he and Winterbottom achieved marvels of close-up filming in the cramped settings of a Range Rover and country hotels' dining rooms and bedrooms. Occasional side glances at the two actor's fictionalised families in London varied the pace and mood of each episode well, while serving to amplify the supposed character traits and flaws (especially egocentric Coogan's) of the comic leads. Throughout, of course, they are ad-libbing (or riffing on pre-scripted comic ideas), playing comic ping-pong across the dinner tables and their auto's front seats. Most memorable are their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Billy Connolly, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and other distinctive voices.

Unlike Larry David and Ricky Gervais, Coogan and Brydon don't rely on guest stars to add fun and frissons to their comic vignettes. Only one appears in the six episodes, and it's no surprise to see that it's Ben Stiller, who'd already visited one of Gervais's Extras sets for a delightful display of self-mockery. This time, he plays a cameo, as himself, being a Hollywood pal in a dream encouraging Coogan to grab the chance of a seven-year TV drama series contract.

Happily (one hopes), it's been reported that Winterbottom has created a feature film from the six episodes, to be released in 2011; it'll be interesting to see what ideas are thought best for the big screen. If it succeeds, will it help Coogan and Brydon to make a new series, if they want to? Or will they feel that one series of edgy self-teasing may be enough of a good thing?

[The second disc in the BBC's DVD set includes deleted scenes, and real documentary coverage of the six host restaurants' kitchens and exquisite dish presentations.]

Devil's whore

Andrea Riseborough has been on a lucky casting streak recently. On TV in 2008, she played the young Margaret Thatcher deliciously well. In 2010, Never Let Me Go, Made in Dagenham and Brighton Rock have given her a trio of British movie successes. In between, she'd collected two Best Actress awards for her title role in The Devil's Whore, a flamboyant BBC TV four-part drama series set in Civil War times.

"Describe in 200 minutes the Civil War period (1642-1660) in terms of interesting politico-religious groups, a sexy and wilful young woman, the beheading of a king and subjugation of brave women and the noble Irish people", is the assignment apparently given himself by Peter Flannery, the saga's screenwriter and experienced British TV writer (co-awardee for Our Friends in the North in 1996 and most recently the creator/producer of Inspector George Gently).

He added: "Do so without focusing negative attention on anti-Catholicism, class warfare, Puritanism, squalor, Scotland and all the hundreds of characters involved in England history's bloodiest period." What TV audiences ended up with was typically well-constructed BBC period piece, an above-average well-acted historical strip-tease with a fictional central character and a few warped historical strands. Fun to look at; nothing to believe.

Riseborough revels in the role of Angelica Fanshawe, the impossibly (for the 17th Century) precocious girl who marries her childhood friend, the son of a minor rural lord. They both know and adore their nicely mannered king, Charles I (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It), though Angelica does talk much out of her social and sexual standing in society.

Civil War breaks out when the king is challenged by Parliament, and Angelica is widowed when the king orders her husband's execution for surrendering his lands to the rebel army. This is led by handsome Oliver Cromwell (Dominic The Wire West), a nicely mannered farmer, and even more handsome Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Centurion Fassbender), who knew and soon knoweth Angelica.

Watching from the wings from the very start has been Thomas Sexby (John Life on Mars Simm), a gloomy facially-gashed soldier returned from German wars and employed as Angelica's protector, which labour of sword-fighting love becomes unpaid self-employment when her second husband is assassinated. For fictional reasons hard to explain in terms of any history, the plot frequently brings Angelica into the lives of rabble-rousing republican preacher Honest John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill, chewing scenery and laughing badly) and his sanctimoniously valiant wife.

Angelica, initially a loyal royalist, had become a "Leveller" with her second husband. She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Sexby so that she can return to the land become a "Digger" and, in due dramatic course, a "Ranter", while her third husband has been unwillingly helping Cromwell to batter the Irish into submission without any scenes mentioning Roman Catholicism.

She is set up to be betrayed by a false Ranter by a vindictive merchant who had acquired her ancestral lands, whom she must kill after her third husband returned from Ireland just in time to disembowel the Ranter and get set up to be betrayed himself during an assassination attempt on Cromwell. Angelica, widowed a third time, is with child from her one night of passion with Sexby, and her story ends with at home with a daughter in a land with a new king.

TV drama director Marc Munden (Vanity Fair) keeps the actors and action moving speedily through colourfully well-lit glamorous and humble settings packed with extras. The background music is irritating, but less so than the over-used computer-generated skyscapes of scudding ominous clouds. They are nagging reminders that this historical drama is a fantastical cartoon.

Pillars of the earth

Ken Follett wrote an epic 1,400-page historical novel about the construction of a medieval cathedral. Applauded by avid page-turners, The Pillars of the Earth was a global best-seller. An experienced American TV adapter and former theatre dramatist (still best known for his first play, Agnes of God), John Pielmeier, was given the task of re-working the saga into an eight-episode 7-hour US$40-million TV drama series funded by German and Canadian companies and the production house of the UK's Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony). Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the son of a Croatian director and a long-time assistant director with Steven Spielberg, directed the whole series on location, mainly in Hungary.

Ian McShane (Deadwood's evil boss) plays evil Waleran Bigod, one centrifugal character in the tale of 12th-Century English monarchy, rebellions and passions. This was the period, apparently called the "Anarchy", when King Stephen ruled in Winchester, Maud and her brother waged the usual oxymoronic "civil" war, and prelates, priors and nobles battled for land and regional power. Out of this chaos, King Henry I emerged.

Follett's saga incorporated the famed tale of St Thomas a Becket's murder; the TV series omits it to save time for the TV-audience-friendlier romantic liaisons between Follett's group of fictional figures. Oddly, it introduces a subplot that Follett didn't think of: the incestuous relationship between the leading lady of evil and her weak-spined cutely-bearded son. Follett presumably approved, because he happily plays along with the project by taking a cameo role as a merchant. The screenwriter is also credited in the lead titles as an actor (as "Cuthbert", whose name wasn't announced during the bits of the first 3 episodes during which I paid much attention).

I stopped watching it after 3 episodes, wishing not to waste four more hours of my life on an old-fashioned pseudo-historical epic, the sort that film-makers still produce for children's TV (without incest and the series' other titillations). The urban crowd and battle scenes are worthily TV-spectacular in the usual ways (hand-held and crane cameras), and the director (and his editing team) probably learned expertise in that area while working for Spielberg.

His handling of scenes with dialogue and close-ups is far less fluent and visually interesting. The characters are wooden, their lines flat, and the cuts from one hammy facial expression to another are almost laughable. Although the tale is that of olde England, some poor Irish and Welsh accents serve only to distract viewers from listening too carefully to the banal dialogue.

Apart from McShane, who glowers in his stylish manner, other competent British actors are also demeaned, being moved insensitively from one prompt spot to the next, in period settings where carpenters, costumiers, stonemasons and lighting engineers worked well to make the series look more credible than it sounds.

Wallander

The first volume in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels was published in 2005, the year after the radical Swedish investigative journalist's suddenly died of a heart attack. His heroes, philandering journalist Mikael Blomkvist and cyber-hacking outcast Lisbeth Salander, made two more annual appearances and earned millions of readers worldwide. Sweden was a new star on the map of international book publishing, whose agents soon realised that Larsson had been preceded by playwright Henning Mankell, another left-winger with connections to Communist parties and a very successful crime-writing franchise, the Wallander series.

The eighth in the series of crime thrillers had been published in Sweden in 1999; all of them had been adapted for local TV (1997-2007). Mankell began planning an English-language series, choosing to join forces with the BBC (its Scotland unit, for unpublished reasons that surely include logistics and funding) and, most important, with actor Kenneth Branagh eager for the title role.

Twice making three films in summertime in the fictional police inspector's home town of Ystad, in 2007 and 2008, the production achieved its goals of creating a popular new TV crime solver (filling gaps left by the end of Morse, Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison, Cracker and others), while maintaining the unglamourous reality of Mankell's books.

The key multi-award-winning factor was Branagh, forgoing theatricality for a restrained presentation of a divorced workaholic middle-aged detective whose father (David Warner) is getting dementia, and sole child, a daughter, is also estranged. His warts-and-all Kurt Wallander is a troubled soul, as concerned about modern Sweden's national character as Larsson's Blomkvist was. His cases bring him into contact with female abuse, serial murder, racism,sexual exploitation, sale of human body parts, perhaps leading Larsson to push the envelope of gore and sensationalism further with Blomkvist's exposes.

The strength of the BBC TV series lay in its production team's creation of a distinctive style (combining cinematography, set design, music and editing) to showcase a credibly bleak and beautiful environment in an isolated town and its wild rural surroundings. Just as Oxford's pretty quaintness was an ideal backdrop for Morse, Ystad looks just as pleasantly chilly as Mankell made it feel in words. The city was wise to invest in the film production company, and reportedly happily awaits Branagh's availability for a third set of movies.

Holes can be picked, of course, in Mankell's plots and/or the screenplay adaptations. Crime thrillers and detective fiction are natural targets for viewer scrutiny far above the level given to family dramas or soaps. There's a major irritant in the over-used reliance on cellphone rings to announce plot developments, and the police station five regular detective team of back-up characters are little-defined and never look in obvious places where Wallander finds clues.

Yet, for just one example, The Man Who Smiled, the fifth 90-minute movie in the UK TV series, is as coldly effective, well-directed and character-driven as a top-notch cinema release such as Insomnia, Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake of a Norwegian detective movie. TV movies are too often wrongly under-rated, their existence and quality not even acknowledged by movie critics who only worship the big screen.

Carlos the jackal

In Hong Kong, Olivier Assayas is best-known as the ex-husband (1998-2001) of Maggie Cheung, who starred in Irma Vep, his biggest success, and remained amicable enough to make Clean with him in 2004. More recently, the Frenchman (son of director Jacques Remy) is better-known in Europe for directing and co-writing a three-part 330-minute TV mini-series, Carlos. Abridged versions (140/160 minutes) also appeared in 2010 in theatres and on DVD, where its anti-heroic title character was more clearly identified as Carlos the Jackal.

After watching the shorter version's first hour, I paused ... the movie's pace, action scenes, cinematography in various countries, multi-lingual script, edge-of-the-seat edginess, and lead actor (Edgar Ramirez) were so good that I wanted to watch the full version and not miss three hours' worth of detail in the extraordinary life of a revolutionary Venezuelan killer who captured OPEC.

The story of "Carlos", originally given Lenin's first name (Ilich) by his father, provides an historical review of the 1970s and 80s by Assayas and lead screenplay writer Dan Franck. Initially a devoted supporter of the Palestinian cause, the violent terrorist became a media notoriety, a star attraction on a global stage. He was also a bon-vivant serial lover, and Assayas boldly includes full frontal nudity to illustrate Carlos's vanity (and European broadmindedness).

Assayas again chose an ideal lead actor: Ramirez is also Venezuelan, he fattens up just as Carlos did in real life, and he dominates the movie with entrancing images of a fiercely driven professional, charming and chilling, calculating and callous, arousing surprising empathy for a mercenary radical.

The abbreviated movie was a cinematic page-turner, and there's a great chance that 330 minutes of my life will be rushed through very happily by a top-grade TV mini-series that is also very good cinema.