The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

Alec Leamas: I reserve the right to be ignorant. That's the Western way of life.

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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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Alec Leamas: What the hell do you think spies are? Moral 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: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?

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When Richard Burton became a superstar, he insisted on casting his friends from his days at the Old Vic and West End (London's equivalent of Broadway). That is why Claire Bloom, who is clearly too old to be a teenager, was cast as Nan Perry. Other friends of Burton's cast in the film included the great stage actor Sir Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy.
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.
In the room in East Germany where Leamas is interrogated by Fiedler, the wallpaper is of English design ("Marigold" by William Morris).
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