The Little Drummer Girl

It's been years since I've seen this movie (or read the book, which I did also), and I'm prompted to say something only because I'm reading a new novel, set in Sarajevo, on roughly the same subject, which brings it all to mind. Quite simply, Diane Keaton (whom I like, sometimes) was abysmally miscast, and since the movie turned around her it hadn't a chance. She was too old, too personally quirky, too American. Charlie is a character whose complexity is that of youthful dumbness mixed with superficial knowingness. There are lot of actresses who could have done it (Natasha Richardson might have been one of them, which would certainly have been interesting), but Keaton wasn't one of them.

It's 1981 West Germany. Katrin delivers a bomb made by mysterious PLO bomb-maker Khalil killing an Israeli diplomat and his family. Charlie (Diane Keaton) is a naive pro-Palestinian actress. She is in Greece to do a job. When she spots Joseph, she believes him to be the masked Palestinian spokesman whose meeting she attended. He's actually an Israeli Mossad agent and they had taken the real masked man who is Khalil's brother Michel. The whole Greece trip is an Israeli trick. They reveal themselves to her and Martin Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) recruits her to be the brother's girlfriend to infiltrate Khalil's group.

John le Carré's brand of espionage stories is often muddled. His world is a murky chaotic vision where questionable things are done which are often not the right course of action. Having said that, I don't understand why the Israelis would ever recruit Charlie. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't see Charlie helping the Israelis or ever believe them enough to really help them. They don't need the recruit to be Jewish, just not anti-Israeli. It might make sense if they pretend to be another terrorist group hoping to connect to Khalil. It's simply hard to understand the Israeli's course of action. Charlie's motivation for her journey is way too twisty. If one can ignore the questionable motivations, the plot is an intriguing twisty affair.

Having read the intriguing novel beforehand, I had looked forward to a film adaption. At that time I always imagined Andrea McArdle, a young Broadway stage actress and the original "Annie" was not only the right age, but had the look and personality of Charlie as described in the book.

Sadly, the casting of Diane Keaton was just a disaster. A choice the entire production never could overcome. Although a good actress, Keaton was about 15 years too old for the role of an ingénue who becomes the obsession of a terrorist, and her pronounced New York accent was too much at times.

The movie follows the novel very closely, perhaps too closely for it's own good. It should nave been about 20 minutes shorter. Still, even at it's full length, the screenplay misses the most interesting moment in the book, where the reader is left to ponder if Charlie has not only infiltrated, but, truly joined the "movement" and was ready to kill for the terrorist group.

The actual production seemed a bit on the cheap side. It appears the director wanted a look of reality, but by 80s standards that meant filming on location using real streets with little local activity to get in the way.

The rest of the cast, except for Klaus Kinski's star turn is totally forgettable.

Finally, over the years I've come to realize, The Little Drummer Girl was a story that was best served on the written page. Too much of the story is internalized in Charlie's mind, and that personal struggle is not easily translated to film.

Professional intelligence case workers appeal to four principal motives to recruit their agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise (meaning blackmail), and Ego, sometimes referred to by the acronym MICE. In THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL, we see a fifth motive used: Screenwriter's Fiat.

Charlie, a little pro-Palestinian Jane Fonda wannabe, is kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad, humiliated, and offered the job of spying on Palestinian terrorists. She accepts because, um, because, well, the screenwriter says so. Okay, so there's a vague effort to make us believe that Charlie's in love with one of the Mossad agents, but since her attraction to him was based entirely on the belief that he was a romantic, dashing leader of the Palestinian `revolution,' there's no basis for her to continue being attracted to him once she learns he's a spy for the Israelis whom she hates.

I'm not sure any woman in the world is quite so easily manipulated as Charlie in this movie. If such a woman really exists anywhere, why on earth would anyone want her as an intelligence agent? Anyone who can be convinced to change sides that easily once can surely be convinced to do so a second time. You wouldn't dare let her out of your sight for ten seconds, and as for allowing her to join a Palestinian terrorist training camp, where she'd be out of sight and in the presence of her old friends for months on end, forget about it. It's absurd. If I were politically correct, I would call it a misogynist movie, but that would probably be unfair. There's no evidence that director George Roy Hill imagined Charlie's weakness and stupidity to be typical of all women.

It's a shame that Charlie is neither a believable nor a likeable heroine, because in every other respect THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a great spy movie. I can't say precisely how realistic it is technically, but it feels authentic at every turn. The brutal interrogations of the captured terrorist, and the intense multilayered surveillance of Charlie ring very true. There's no one-man-army James Bond crap here; the Israelis assign a full squad of spies to every job. More importantly it gives us the psychological feel of the espionage profession. The stock in trade of professional spies is the betrayal of loyalty and the abuse of friendship. Naturally, this does not make for likeable characters, however much one may admire the cause for which they work. Hill does not attempt to sugarcoat this; he shows it to us as it is.

Diane Keaton should not be blamed for failing to make her ridiculous character convincing; she is clearly doing the best she can, and quite probably the best that anyone could have. Klaus Kinski steals every scene he gets as Mossad master agent Marty Kurtz. David Suchet gets a fine small role as a terrorist thug.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a fine example of how outstanding supporting performances, dedication, and sincerity (you rarely find movies this honest in Hollywood anymore) can rescue a movie whose protagonist is badly written. It's not half the movie it could have been, but it's a good movie anyway.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: See it on video or DVD with your friends.

This 1984 film based on John Le Carre's book could well have been written just a few days ago. The confrontation between Israel and Palestine has not changed over the years although the explosive device chosen in the film happens to be a nasty bomb hidden in a suit case and detonated at a distance. Much of the excitement of the story seems to revolve around the preparation and delivery of the suit cases and the spy and counter spy activities.

My reason for choosing this film was to see more of the work of Klaus Kinski (an explosive personality if ever there was one) but in this film he was very much in control. In the role of Kurtz he is responsible for selecting Charlie (Diane Keaton) to spy among the Palestinians. Charlie being a superb actress could handle the job expertly using her feminine charms.

The film has a very large cast...too large in fact...and one tends to get lost amongst all the characters trying to remember which are the Israelis and which are the Palestinians.

The film literally starts with a bang and the search is on to find the perpetrators. As the tension mounts and the bombs explode, one keeps asking, "Who will be next?"

One cannot visualize a happy ending for such a film. While it makes exciting viewing the tragedy is that lives are still being lost each day as the confrontation continues and hopes of peace seem to become even more remote.