In the 1965 film The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Richard Burton's disgruntled secret intelligence officer Alec Leamas offers a choice appraisal of his profession: "What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten up their rotten little lives."
Based on the book by John le Carré, Leamas is one of the many less-than-glamorous spies that populate the author's work and their adaptations, from an out-dated, out-numbered and out of style Gary Oldman in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to a haggard Philip Seymour Hoffman, giving one of his final (and greatest) performances as a German intelligence officer in A Most Wanted Man.
