Love of spy films' versitility, vitality no secret

Two major holiday releases vividly affirm the versatility and vitality of the cinema spy genre.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, starring insanely daring actor Tom Cruise as insanely fearless secret agent Ethan Hunt, exemplifies the enduringly popular formula of secret agent as action superhero. Seeing Cruise do his own stunts on the outside of Dubai's 160-story Burj Khalifa - the world's tallest building - is enough to make viewers wish for theater seat belts.

The antithesis to Mission: Impossible's romanticized heroes arrives Friday, in a new version of John Le Carr's classic 1974 espionage novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy No acrophobia-inducing leaps from tall buildings, no sexy spy guys and gals in gull-wing sports cars, just seedy, unglamorous agents getting believably, permanently dead as pawns in a chess match between their ethically compromised bosses.

Both films are excellent examples of their type of spy movie and could hardly be less alike. Ghost Protocol - already an international box-office hit - is a pure comic-book adventure in which reality never intrudes. It aims to work you into a state of adrenalin-fueled excitement. Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force conjure up any fantastic futuristic gizmo at a moment's notice, or easily shake off any kind of fall, punch, bullet or car crash.

Events are far more grounded in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set in the early-1970s Cold War. Where M:I! ha s second-to-second thrills, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy slowly builds a deep, palpable atmosphere of danger and tension. The unlikely "hero," played by Gary Oldman, is George Smiley, a moral man who has spent decades of moral ambiguity in the over-lit halls of the British Secret Service, playing deadly games of chess with Soviet spy-master Karla. Smiley - the name is nothing if not ironic - uses intellect, not muscle, to fight his foes. When he can identify them.

Ongoing spy series

In Mission: Impossible's exuberant fantasy and Tinker Tailor's grim reality, the spy-movie genre continues to thrive. Other recent spy films include The Debt, Salt, The Tourist, Hannah and Fair Game This year will bring more, including The Bourne Legacy (Aug. 3), fourth in the 10-year-old series; and Skyfall,the 23rd James Bond adventure. Skyfall's Nov. 9 release comes an incredible 50 years after the London premiere of the first Bond movie, Dr. No, on Oct. 5, 1962.

Though the dreary and morally compromised aspects of inte! lligence -gathering have dominated spy literature from writers such as Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, John Le Carr and Len Deighton, movies, with some notable exceptions, favor a highly romanticized view of spying as a life of glamour and adventure with clearly defined bad guys and good guys.

English innovators

The British were early masters of sound-era spy films, and no one did them better than Alfred Hitchcock, who firmly established the espionage movie as a heady mix of action, romance, suspense and humor. His films often featured exotic locales, now de rigueur in Bond, Bourne or Mission: Impossible films.

At the same time, he virtually invented the innocent-bystander spy subgenre - an ordinary citizen accidently involved in a fiendish plot - in still popular classics such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, remade by Hitchcock in 1956), The 39 Steps (1935), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942) and, perhaps best of all, the fabulously entertaining North by Northwest, which finds confused Cary Grant mistaken for a spy.

Nobo! dy was i nnocent, however, in Notorious (1946), Hitchcock's most romantic and suspenseful spy film: U.S. agent (Grant) dangles a seductress (Ingrid Berman) in front of Nazis in South America and almost waits too long to pull her back.

Effects of WWII and Cold War on the genre

World War II inspired a rash of fact-based spy films featuring Nazi foes. In 5 Fingers (1952), James Mason plays the real-life Nazi spy code-named Cicero. Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) is the stirring story of war-widowed mother Violette Szabo, who went undercover with the French resistance. The House on 92nd Street (1945) uses documentary-style and location shooting to recount how FBI agents broke a Nazi spy ring in New York. The Man Who Never Was (1956) re-creates the ingenious plan (Operation Mincemeat) to mislead the Axis powers about the invasion of Sicily.

Postwar neo-Nazi thrillers - usually about attempts to bring back the Third Reich's glory days - became a popular spy sub-genre, with entries such as The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Odessa File (1974) and The Boys From Brazil (1978), in which Hitler has been cloned 94 times, thanks to evil Nazi Dr. Mengele (Peck). Dustin Hoffman is tortured by Nazi Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man (1976).

In the late 1940s, with nuclear weapons proliferating and communism spreading, many spy tales traded in brutal Nazi villains fo! r treach erous commies. Red-paranoia spy films were dependable attractions, often more propaganda than entertainment, aided by the constant fear headlines from Washington.

These were a mixed bag, at best, but the ultimate communist-paranoia espionage film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), from the novel by Richard Condon, is among the most original of all spy films. Frank Sinatra and others are brainwashed by Chinese communists in a bizarre plot to elect a dimwit puppet as U.S. president, with a Commie first lady (Angela Lansbury) pulling his strings.

Bond and the modern take

The modern era of action-fantasy spy films launched when Agent 007 got his license to thrill in Dr. No Over the next five decades, the Bond films bounced between excellent (From Russia With Love, Goldfinger) and wretched (The Man With the Golden Gun, Moonraker) numerous times, adapting their heady mix of suspense, comedy, action and absurdity to whatever the era required. In 2006, the series regained its misplaced cool and relevance by returning to the core of author Ian Fleming's original 1953 Bond story, Casino Royale

Le Carr's international best-seller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) became an intens! e drama of wholly believable espionage starring Richard Burton as an aging agent sent into the "cold" for one final mission. The IPCRESSFile, by Len Deighton, became that rare good crossover spy film (1965), successfully mixing the melodrama of a Bond film with the gritty realism of Le Carr. Michael Caine starred as the cool anti-hero secret agent Harry Palmer, a role he continued in two more films and two 1990s TV movies.

And let's not forget the countless comic imitations, a subgenre of their own. Our Man Flint (1966), one of the earliest, starred James Coburn as Derek Flint. Funny then, it has dated badly. The Silencers (1966) launched Dean Martin as Matt Helm in a series of perhaps the worst spy comedies ever made. And, of course, there are the Austin Powers movies (a fourth is threatened for 2013), with Mike Myers in a parody of spy parodies so silly they almost make Mission: Impossible seem, well, possible.

Former Houston Chronicle film critic Louis B. Parks is a freelance writer.