The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

Watch "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold" (1965) online on iFILM — Martin Ritt's adaptation of John le Carré's novel, with Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer stationed in divided Berlin who keeps losing his agents one by one to East German counterintelligence.

Called back to London, Leamas is handed one final operation: play a burnt-out defector, drift into the orbit of the enemy, and help destroy Mundt — the Stasi officer behind his agents' deaths. The plan looks clean. It is not clean. By the time Leamas grasps the full shape of what London has actually arranged, he is already too deep inside it.

Shot in stark black and white with no musical scoring to soften the tension, this is le Carré's Cold War as it was meant to be seen — bureaucratic, morally hollow, and cold in every sense. Burton turned down flashier projects to take this role and delivered one of his most restrained performances. Stream The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in full on iFILM.