The Little Drummer Girl

Hey, WHOLE thing is just fabulous!!! I really appreciate the idea, the plot of eternal choice between ideas and feelings, human valuables and political views.. I think cast and directing are just amazing!!!! Why the hell Diane Keaton is too old?? Are you crazy? Are you go insane?? SHE'S PERFECT in that role so as in ALL her roles!!! She is highly believable as a woman, who wanted just to date with a gye and then found herself in that terrible adventure, without any right answer on question - what is wrong and what is right. She was like ship, which lost course and she tried to orientate on her feelings and that was so hard, because she understood both sides of fight and couldn't stand from..OMG, every woman could understand this.. I really love this movie, although it's too hard to re-watch it.

Apart from a few curious departures from Le Carre's book of the same name the main thing wrong with this film is the casting of Diane Keaton as Charlie. Why the producers saw fit to use a relatively minor American actress to play the key role in this very strong story is something of a mystery, particularly when so many fine European actors were available at the time. Keaton strives to do her best but remains unconvincing throughout the play and her inadequacies are, unfortunately, highlighted by the superb performances from the rest of the stellar cast. Notwithstanding, the film is still well worth watching if only for the performances of Klaus Kinski and the rest of the cast. Plus the strong story line tends to over-ride some of the casting flaws. Moreover, since the film was made in the 1980's it is grittily realistic and doesn't suffer from the mawkish revisionism of recent films about international terrorism. Note: the earlier commentator who wondered why the character of Charlie would have been selected as a intelligence agent, seems to have missed the main point of the story. Charlie wasn't an agent - she was bait.

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.

The novel by John Le Carré is the best spy novel ever written. It is a work of pure genius and it elevates the genre to literature. Daniel Silva has made a career out of basically borrowing everything from this book for his Gabriel Allon series. Forget about the fact that she's a terrible actress, but Diane Keaton is just too old for the part. Charlie was a very young and hip woman, not a middle-aged dork...and she was English. She isn't even hot enough for the role. In the movie she's obviously too old for the Arab terrorist Michel who she was supposed to be involved with. Yorgo Voyagis as Joseph was also a little too old for the part and he is just too much of a Rock Hudson lookalike for my tastes. At least he could have lost the * star moustache. The best bit of casting was Klaus Kinski as Kurtz. If ever a movie needs to be remade it would be this excellent story. Update: It has been remade as a TV series which better suits the novel. The TV series is better, not great, but better.

John Le Carre is the master of the spy novel. His stories, including this one, are more into the psychology of the characters than to violence and action. The film is a faithful rendition of the novel. Charlie, an actress, is "recruited" by the Israeli equivalent of our CIA, to cast a net to catch a terrorist. Her role will be to get close to the terrorist by claiming to be the girlfriend of the terrorist's brother. She is pro-Palestinian, so will she play along or not? Does she even want to get involved? It is not obvious as to why Charlie chooses as she does. I think that while she supports the Palestinian cause, she does not condone their bombings. Later, when she gets to know the terrorist responsible for the bombings, she is swayed back towards favoring the terrorists, but perhaps not all the way back. As typical with spy stories, characters are not always who they seem to be, but it isn't that difficult to follow. The only character whose true identity is in question is Charlie, and that is partly the role she is asked to play in the plot and partly her ambivalence and uncertainty as to what she should do. Diane Keaton is excellent as Charlie, and the rest of the cast are also terrific.

It's incredible that this major 1984 release--next-to-last feature for the Oscar-winning director of "Butch Cassidy," "The Sting," "The World of Henry Orient," "Slap Shot," "The World According to Garp" and more--is so completely forgotten and hard to access now, even if it was a commercial disappointment. Diane Keaton is miscast as le Carre's heroine, a British actress with liberal beliefs who is duped into infiltrating Palestinian terrorist ranks so that US/Israeli intelligence can in turn betray her and destroy the anti-Israeli cadre. In le Carre's novel, the central figure is an actress very young in years and naive politically. Not only was Keaton wrong in terms of age and nationality (she looks ridiculous in the boot-camp segments, but even more so in her early sequence as a U.S. actress improbably starring onstage in Shakespeare), but her unflattering frizzy hairdos and shoulder-padded costumes make her look even older. (SPOILERS) Nonetheless, her committed performance and Hill's deft handling of a very complicated narrative draw you in, eventually riveting attention. The violent climax is startling, Keaton's subsequent sequence of complete nervous breakdown as good as anything she's ever done. It's also worth seeing for stellar supporting performances by Sami Frey and an unusually subdued Klaus Kinski.

Instead of "rethinking its policies" or "trying to understand the terrorists", the Israeli government, as accurately portrayed in this movie, has developed a novel approach to dealing with fanatical groups that attack civilians: blow them to smithereens!!!!! A truly no-nonsense film, with some beautiful Mediterranean locations, the Little Drummer Girl does come off as somewhat cheap in the technical sense (a larger budget could've ensured some truly dazzling action scenes, and lessened the dependence on dragged-out dialogue). Still, the authentic depiction of Mossad antiterrorism techniques (surveillance, baiting, seizure, interrogation, assasination) more than compensated for the occasionally low-budget climate. The acting was excellent, and though some may feel Diane Keaton looked too old for her role (a difficult claim to dispute when viewing the Oscar winner's sex scenes), her inadequacies were well concealed by brilliant performances from Yorgo Voyagis, Eli Danker, and Klaus Kinski. One of my favorite lines in the film was when Danker's character, Litvak, asks why they can't just seal off the German town where a bomber is hiding, and Marty Kurtz (Kinski) replies "This isn't the West Bank, Shimon."

Diane Keaton stars as an actress who falls for a Palestinian terrorist, only to discover that he's really a Mosad agent posing as a Palestinian terrorist. They want to recruit her to pose as the girlfriend of the real terrorist in order to trap his brother, who is a bigger and badder terrorist. One of a slew of mediocre John le Carré adaptations. The film takes an excessively complex and elliptical approach to unveiling the plot, leaving to viewer puzzled for at least an hour of it's 2 hour running time. Keaton feels miscast, but Klaus Kinski adds quite a bit of life to the proceedings as the main Mosad agent. An extremely young Bill Nighy pops in and out as Keaton's friend.

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.

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, might have been a fine "unknown" choice for the role. 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 truly joined the "movement" and was ready to kill for the terrorist group she had infiltrated. 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.