Molly Haskell

“British actors can wrap themselves in the past, go back to Coward, Waugh, Trolloppe, Shakespeare, Shaw, Marlowe without so much as a strain of the eye muscle; but plunk American actors into any era more remote than the 'fifties, and they look like little kids in mommies' and daddies' clothes. Is it our eternal innocence as a nation, our refusal to grow up that makes our actors look out to sea in period? Or is it insufficient training in the classics on their part, combined with rampant individualism encouraged by a society that values stars and personalities more than craftsmen?

“These thoughts, prompted by seeing Diane Keaton in The Little Drummer Girl and Bill Murray in The Razor's Edge, lead to my next question: Wouldn't they be better advised to give up and go back to doing what they do best, i.e., being themselves?

“Early on in The Little Drummer Girl… , Diane Keaton appears as the actress heroine doing a scene from Saint Joan… When she marches downstage… and declaims Shaw's passionate final speech, you half expect Woody Allen to reach out with a vaudeville hook and yank her offstage. If only….

“Keaton and Murray both have strong, quirky, essentially "now" personalities that have dictated the shape of their roles, and these roles, in turn, have stuck to them like adhesive.

“If Diane Keaton had been any less memorably funny as the Kierkegaard-spouting culture vulture in Manhattan, perhaps we could take her more seriously as a tragedienne that Britain would waive Equity rules and and hire. Her implausibility is compounded by the fact that Le Carre's "Charlie" was one of the most unmotivated characters ever to carry the plot of a bestseller. During an all-night "persuasion" session--fudged over in both book and movie--this actress with Arab sympathies (inspired by Vanessa Redgrave?) becomes an Israeli spy. Is she meant to be a "cause-y" dilettante? a fanatic in search of religion? a girl with a "thing" for swarthy terrorists?

“… Hill effectively sustains a mood of creeping danger and uncertainty. But some of the uncertainty comes for the blurring of ideological differences that has always been Le Carre's literary trademark and which the ambituity of the Keaton character does nothing to resolve. We're never quite sure whom we're rooting for, and perhaps that's the point: at night, all terrorists are black. This is indeed a black movie, except for those odd flashes of color as Diane Keaton flits across the screen.”

Molly Haskell
Vogue, November 1984

[Has Haskell forgotten Keaton in Reds? Also, since Charlie dominates the movie, how much sense does the last sentence make?]