The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

Ashe: [Approaching Leamas who is sitting on a bench] Do you like birds? The ones with the white collars are wild. The others are domesticated. With people it's the other way around.
Alec Leamas: [He snickers]
Ashe: Bird-watching's one of my hobbies. I often come here.
Alec Leamas: Do you also often come to Wormwood Scrubs Prison at eight o'clock in the morning to watch birds?
Ashe: Yes, jailbirds. They're my other hobby.
Alec Leamas: Only the young ones, surely!

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Alec Leamas: Mundt was a Nazi, wasn't he?
Fiedler: He was a member of the Hitler Youth... as a boy.
Alec Leamas: Now he's a grown-up Communist. He was what I would call... available.
Fiedler: Like you!... Shall we begin? Let me start by asking you an amusing question.
Alec Leamas: Let me start by asking you one! Make you laugh your head off! Where's my money? When can I go whatever... whatever home is? And Carleton's gone home! Peters has gone home! What about me?
Fiedler: The agreement was...
Alec Leamas: Agreement!... You've broken the bloody agreement and barring miracles my bloody neck too! The agreememnt was that I should be interrogated for two weeks in Holland, paid, and allowed to slip quietly back to England without anyone knowing. I'd have been away and nobody would have known if you haven't broken the story.
Fiedler: Just who the hell do you think you are? How dare you come sniffing in here like Napoleon ordering me about? You are a traitor! Does it occur to you? A wanted, spent, dishonest man, the lowest currency of the Cold War? We buy you - we sell you - we lose you - we even can shoot you! Not a bird would stir in the trees outside. Not even a single pheasant would turn his head to see what fell.

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Control: We have to live without sympathy, don't we? We can't do that forever. One can't stay out of doors all the time. One needs to come in from the cold.
Alec Leamas: I'm an operator, Control, just an operator.
Control: There's a vacancy in Banking Section which might suit you.
Alec Leamas: Sorry, I'm an operational man. I'll take my pension. I don't want a desk job.
Control: You don't know what's on the desk.
Alec Leamas: Paper!
Control: [after taking a long sip from his tea cup] I want you to stay, uh, out in the cold... a little longer.

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David Lodge says in his memoirs he had disastrous interview with Martin Ritt for the part of Patmore.
Richard Burton and co-star Warren Mitchell were Royal Air Force cadets together at Oxford in 1944, where they knew one another and became friends. From 1944-47, when both were demobilized, they were stationed together at times in Canada and back in England.
The phrase "Number 11 bus", which is heard a few times, is British slang for walking; your two legs look like the number 11.
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