Keaton as Charlie -- click text to watch scene

“The conception of Charlie is a modern cliché, a piece of psychobabble: she's an actress--i.e., a woman without a center, a flighty woman who feels empty and is looking for a role to play that will make her feel 'real.' But Keaton takes this conception so far that she gives it a painful, shrill validity….”  Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael

“At the start of The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton is jittery and off-putting. As Charlie . . . she comes on strong and talks faster than anybody else. She's like someone on speed or on a caffeine jag: she responds to what people say before they've finished saying it. Then she's dissatisfied with what she hears herself rattling off, and before the words are out of her throat she half wants to take them back. The conception of Charlie is a modern cliché, a piece of psychobabble: she's an actress--i.e., a woman without a center, a flighty woman who feels empty and is looking for a role to play that will make her feel "real." But Keaton takes this conception so far that she gives it a painful, shrill validity. She doesn't do anything to make you like Charlie. Rather, she shows you this woman't avid attempts to be lovable, and she plays the part without creamy makeup: her dark, smudgy eyeliner and the pile of curls covering her forehead make her look flirtatious and anxious. It took me a while to comprehend that Diane Keaton was being off-putting because she was totally in character. Charlie is emotionally hungry. Smart and brazenly attractive, she's so miserably starved there's something wolfish about her. At the same time, she's trying to be tought--she's trying not to let herself be kidded. She's a jangled, poignant mess.

“…. [W]hen it becomes apparent that Kurtz's manipulation of Charlie's need for involvement and approval is the emotional center of the movie it isn't enough…. [T]he movie is too big to be a suspense story about the effects of violence on Charlie. There's a disproportion here. We see too many Israelis and Palestinians murdered for us to zero in on whether this wreck of a woman is emotionally destroyed or finds love--or both, which is what the ending suggests.

“Clearly, Diane Keaton's Charlie digs being center stage, but in the glimpses of here as Shaw's Saint Joan and as Rosalind in As You Like It she's peculiarly offhand and unemotional. Even an actress who's losing her youth and knows that she's not getting anywhere could have a little more showmanship; Charlie seems too flaccid a performer. As Keaton plays her, she's much more vivid and emotionally naked offstage. Klaus Kinski's Kurtz maneuvers her like a master puppeteer, and she responds gratefully…. Although Keaton works hard at it, there's no electricity between Charlie and the stolid, manly Israeli agent Joseph… Charlie doesn't seem to be the sort of woman to respond to a man who's like an oak tree with yearning, cow eyes. There's a lot more spark in the air when she's with Sami Frey, who plays Khalil . . . . [W]hen Khalil realizes that Charlie has set him up for slaughter his twisted smile at his own gullibility makes you feel what's missing from the role of Charlie. Frey makes direct contact with the audience in a way that Keaton doesn't until well into the second hour.

“A woman without a clear sense of identity is highly problematic as the protagonist-victim of a journalistic spy melodrama. Diane Keaton has, of course, played women with identity problems before; that was Annie Hall's trouble--she kept putting herself down, apologetically, and Keaton made a light art out of indecision, exasperated sights, eyes rolling upward. Charlie, though, isn't comic. She has all of Annie Hall's self-consciousness and self-doubt, and, yes, she's distrustful yet overeager. But it isn't charming flakiness; it's desperate flakiness--you can read the panic in her flickering expressions. And the character of Charlie, who, wanting to be a heroine, gets into a world of horrors beyond her imagining, is maybe too flaky to give the shallow picture substance and resonance.

“Keaton's performance starts clicking when Charlie is in the Palestinian camp and has to condemn an Israeli boy to death, and it snaps together in a shocking scene toward the end, when Khalil asks Charlie what she is, and she howls out what she feels is the truth about herself. Keaton takes you right into the core of Charlie's neurosis; she galvanizes the audience, and for an instant the movie seems to work. But the tense, abrasive Charlie doesn't have anything of the conventional heroine about her, and she's at odds with Hill's logical methods of storytelling. (If she were more conventional, she might fit into the movie better, but we'd forget the whole thing immediately.) Keaton leaps right over likability and crowd-pleasing--she's out there all alone doing something daring. Sometimes the performances we remember the most are the ones that threw us off initially; I wasn't prepared for Keaton's passionate immersion in her role. Her Charlie is a compulsive liar who keeps trying on styles and discarding them, looking for one that will convey sincerity; she winds up a compulsive truthteller. It's maddening that this performance can't carry the dead weight put on it.”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 1984
State of the Art, pp 257-260

Stanley Kauffmann

"The Tiny Drummer Girl"

“…. The casting in general is spotty and, at is center, it's deplorable. The best choice is Klaus Kinski as Schultz….

“Most of the other actors are, at best, passable. But the title role, the pivotal role, is played by Diane Keaton, and around her the picture collapses in tatters. She is so feeble, so inappropriate, that she underscores the dangers of Le Carré adaptation, the dwarfing of this book into just one more political thriller.

“Begin with the fact that Keaton is dressed and photographed poorly. It's only three years since she was in Reds, but she is made to look as if it were much longer. In that earlier political romance she gave her best performance; the director, Warren Beatty, brought her out of the casual hipness of her five Woody Allen films, brought her to fullness and conviction. In The Little Drummer Girl, Hill was apparently unable or uninterested to do the same with her. Back she goes to Woody Allen offhandedness, and out the window goes Le Carré’s heroine.

“In every sense Keaton gives a slurred performance. Her speech is slurred in a way that makes Saturday Night Live sound like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And her speech is typical of everything else she does. She seems to slur on to the screen and off it; she slurs her feelings, her very presence, in a way that matches her throwaway speech. Very early she supplies a moment that virtually wrecks the rest of the role. She is supposed to be an American actress playing Shaw's Saint Joan with an English company. The few lines of hers that we hear are sub-high school, yet Schultz, who is in the audience, is convinced that she is the actress he needs for a play he has in mind. Keaton's weakness as the actress she plays, let alone in her own acting, undermines Le Carré’s main and fascinating idea.

“…. (A hint of Vanessa Redgrave, superb actress and Palestinian zealot, hovers behind this woman in the novel.)…. Le Carré… wants to dramatize some relatively abstract aspects of a terrible reality; and at the center of the dramatization he puts--of course--an actress. She thinks she believes in one side, but as an actress she can put the truth of her acting at the service of the opposing side. In this seeming eqivocation, Le Carré sees the grim symmetry of the opposing sides…. [A]s the story's crowning metaphor, just as the two forces are fighting each other here on foreign, neutral terrain, so the two forces are pitted within this one woman who ends up neutral, believing in neither side.

“What the role needed was a Redgrave, ten years younger, someone within whose being all these immediate matters and their amplifications could resonate, someone who could crystallize the ironies of falling in love with an Israeli who enacts a Palestinian in their affair so that she can later convince the true Palestinian with whom she will have an affair. Keaton, however, looks and behaves like not much more than a veteran subscriber to Rolling Stone. When she is lured to her first meeting with the Israeli contingent and they propose their plan to her, her wispiness makes them look foolish for choosing her. With exactly the same script, with every sequence and all the same other actors, this film would hold more of Le Carré if the Drummer Girl herself were adequate. Here his book is shriveled, not condensed, because Keaton is so small.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, date?

David Denby

“…. If a spy is by necessity an actor, a real actor might make a particularly effective double agent. His devotion to his role might overwhelm his sense of identity, which was tenuous to begin with; finally, he would have nothing of his "real" feelings to give away, and thus he would be especially hard to detect. Le Carre gave the theme an additonal twist: He made the actor a woman, and specifically a woman easily led by the men she falls in love with. The book is entrancing--le Carre's best, I think--but there's an unpleasant element in it, a layer of contempt, not only for convictionless actors but also for women, who are perceived as lacking the firm center, the iron sense of self, that is a man's.

‘George Roy Hill's The Little Drummer Girl is no better than competent and efficient, but it preserves le Carre's central ideas, so the picture is still fascinating…. A young actress of moderate talent who has pronounced left-wing, pro-Palestinian views, Charlie is a sort of minor-league Vanessa Redgrave, with an extremely active sex life. Having chosen Diane Keaton as their lead, Hill and screenwriter Loring Mandel have turned Charlie into an older American (with the same politics) who is acting in England, an actress who will never be a star. They just barely get by with the switch. The movie Charlie doesn't quite talk like an American, nor does she have the native incisiveness--the smart, bitter, slangy patter of the English left-wing dilettante--that made Charlie appealing as well as infuriating and glib. But Diane Keaton gives a taut, heartfelt performance. She has jettisoned the dithering charm, the adorable vagueness of her Woody Allen period and also the grating edge that emerged in the early scenes of Reds. She has her own style of incisiveness--brittle, taunting, ironic--that gives way fast to confusion and even helplessness when she is overmastered. And she's captured Charlie's peculiar sensuality--her easy surrender to men who can teach her something, men who have led the warrior's life. In bed with her lovers, she fondles their scars….

“Stranded much of the time, Diane Keaton still comes through. Her performance has the force of a confession: Charlie's desperate shuffling of identities, her grasping at opinions she hasn't quite made her own, her terrifying sense of vacancy are things that only another actress could fully understand. But if Diane Keaton has drawn on the self-loathing that builds up in her strange profession, she hasn't succumbed to it. She seems to assert that to play a role well one must possess extraordinary sensitivity to the feelings of others. Passing back and forth between Israelis and Palestinians, she vibrates in response to moral passions that are both mutually exclusive and unappeasable, and by the end she has become ennobled by her duplicity. She expunges whatever distate le Carre felt for the character; she turns the double agent without convictions into a moral heroine.”

David Denby
New York, October 29, 1984

“…. Charlie, easily molded by the men who attract her, is the kind of actress who doesn't have an identity of her own; she needs to play a role in life (as well as onstage) in order to fill up a sense of emptiness inside. Denounced as "a piece of psychobabble" by critic Pauline Kael [who also claimed Keaton gave it "a painful, shrill validity"], the theme made perfect sense to me. Actors, with their superior powers of self-projection, see themselves as committed to this or that moral cause; Keaton caught the mix of brazenness, voluptuousness, self-dramatization, and sheer talent at work in Charlie's impersonations. It was enjoyable to watch her play a smart woman who was essentially a fraud--her work had alertness and tension and a withering sense of the grounding of moral sentiment in vanity. Again, she followed the premise to its conclusion--by the end, Charlie was exhausted by her emotional commitment to what she only half believed.

Denby
"The Secret of Her Success"
Premiere, November 1988

James Wolcott

“As natural and forthright an actress as Diane Keaton is, she does have movie star cheekbones. And those cheekbones, glossy and full, get in the way of The Little Drummer Girl… Keaton stars as Charlie, a callow but spirited actress…. Although Keaton is on sharp lookout in this movie--there's no Annie Hall daydreaminess, no flirty, birdy tilts of the head--she isn't convincing in tights as Saint Joan or in a black T-shirt as a guerilla trainee. The shine of her cheekbones clashes with the grit of her olive-green fatigues. Charlie needs to be younger and more blankly smooth, more susceptible to praise, coaxing, pressure. Diane Keaton just has too much been-around savvy to play this radical-chic innocent….

James Wolcott
Texas Monthly, December 1984

David Edelstein

“A few years ago, something miraculous happened to Diane Keaton: her feelings were introduced to her mind. Actors spend whole careers without bridging that void, and Keaton had actually made a style of the discontinuity. In the '70s she embodied a new, neurasthenic American heroine (widely imitated since)--a charming ditherer who snorted at her own inarticulateness, slapped her head in frustration, and smiled adorably as the ether seeped back into her brain. As Annie Hall and "the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award" in Manhattan, she turned the exploring-your-own-feelings school of Method acting into a delicious standup routine: her brain would send out a search party into the wilds of her emotions, and she'd watch as a single survivor came crawling back--torn, bloodied, an arrow in her back, babbling incoherently and then giving up the ghost. “I'm not sure this style was always intentional. At times it seemed as if Keaton was lost in her own head, and her acting in serious roles was hit-or-miss. But that added to her vulnerability; she had a tremulous honesty that made us pull for her as an actress. And she kept plugging. In her nice-try performance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, she was able to express her longings physically, even if the words still sounded piped in. It wasn't until Shoot the Moon, early in 1982, that Diane Keaton quietly and firmly laid all doubts to rest. As Albert Finney's battle-scarred wife, she was alert, sardonic, ambibalent, melancholy; she proved she could think on screen. And because she'd become so technically adept, she could express those thoughts in the simplest gestures and inflections. “In George Roy Hill's tense and provocative new thriller, The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton gives the performance of her life[Edelstein would later write that her best performance was probably Shoot the Moon]…. “Implicit in the story is that the actress's politics have no depth--she selects them like a costume, because they show off her figure…. [B]ut the film isn't about the comeuppance of a Vanessa Redgrave; it's about an actress who enters the tumultous "theater of the real" and learns how unreal her life and ideas until that moment have been. “As the American leading lady in an English repertory company, even a bad one, Keaton is miscast. But this proves irrelevant, since The Little Drummer Girl doesn't turn the world into a stage, where an actress can be brilliant and still keep the windows to her sould tightly shuttered. It turns the world into a film, where the people Charlie tries to fool peer into her face as skeptically, as pitilessly, as a movie camera. “In struggling to be "real," Keaton gives what is virtually an essay on her own acting--using her well-worn shtick selectively and commenting on it. Early in the film, when she's interrogated by the Israelis, she launches into a monologue about a childhood trauma, and she looks like the old Diane Keaton: her chin quivers, her eyes tear up, as she "relives" the scene; watching her, I thought, "Oh, Diane, shit, really, this is your Oscar turn and it's so bogus." And then Klaus Kinski points out that everything she's uttered is a lie, that she did that monologue just recently for a journalist, and, in a startling coup de theatre, Keaton turns on her tormentors with coruscating rage. [she does?] Someone saw through her Method acting--and she did it so well! She did it so well she almost believed it herself! Pigs! “It's daring of Keaton to be bad in so familiar a way, without letting us in beforehand on the joke. But that humility is the secret of her growth in the last decade, and it accounts for our extraordinary empathy with her. (Among contemporary actresses, only the more aggressive Debra Winger stirs these kinds of feelings in an audience.) When Charlie is grilled by the Palestinians and then trained to fight in one of their camps, we root for her the way we root for Diane Keaton in an ambitious role: don't overdo it, now, Charlie, don't push too much, think before you speak, live the part. And in a stunning paradox, her tragedy is that she does, at times, succeed in living the part--even as she's setting people up to be killed. “Keaton's most fascinating moments are when Charlie stands back from her performance, horrified at the intensity of her feelings for the Palestinians and yet determined not to fuck up this great, real song and dance. The movie doesn't make her initial decision to join the Israelis convincing…. But once she takes the plunge, her struggle to keep on trouping is palpable: she's not going back to blocking traffic in Trafalgar Square, even if people she's come to love must be killed. This gives the film a genuinely tragic dimension: it's not only the Israeli and Palestinian brutalities that tear her apart; it's her own collusion in them. For the first time she comprehends the link between her politics and her selfish inner needs, and in the grisly, cathartic climax, the consequences of her great performance are splattered over her face. The Middle East's Oscar, as it were. “This is an epic piece of acting, but Keaton could not have risen to such heights without Le Carré's terrific scenario or Loring Mandel's lucid adaptation….. The final triumph of Keaton's performance here and in Shoot the Moon is that maturity becomes her: in jettisoning the mannerisms of a lifetime and simply being "herself," she's more alive than almost anyone in movies. Diane Keaton isn't merely a great actress; she's an exemplary one.” David Edelstein Village Voice, date ? 

Jack Kroll

“In the age of mega-jitters, the spy seems to have replaced the cowboy as our favorite pop protagonist. At once romantic and grubby, daring and sneaky, champion and chiseler, the agent--single, double or multiple--embodies with disquieting perfection an age of ambiguity. The Little Drummer Girl presents us with a brilliant variation on this theme…. The book, with is probing of the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, managed to anger proponents of both sides and the faithful screen adaptation… will not assuage that anger. Nor will that disquiet be relieved by the vivid and powerful performance of Diane Keaton, who as Charlie becomes the perfect embodiment of le Carré's idea of the spy as tool, as tabula rasa, as a refillable bottle of beliefs, as the ultimate actor.

“Keaton's special gifts have never been better used than in her portrayal of Charlie, the stage actress and self-styled radical who latches on to causes with the same fierce but hollow passion with which she seizes lovers….

“…. [L]ike the novel, the film succeds in placing the moral claims of both Israelis and Palestinians within the broader question of commitment itself. Kurtz wants to use Charlie because "she is bright, creative, underused, romantic--and a liar." The terrifying accuracy of his analysis is borne out by Charlie herself. She becomes a perverse Galatea of our explosive time, manipulated by Pygmalions on both sides, planting bombs and making love with an exultant desperation that makes her an unforgettable character. In Charlie the double agent embodies the ambiguous blend of loyalty and betrayal that characterizes so many--perhaps most--human actions and relations.

“This is a part that Diane Keaton was born to play. With her entrancing and unsettling sense of the absurdity of the actor, she is devastating in her creation of a woman fiercely searching for a reality beyond role playing. Trapped in one of her many betrayals, her victim asks her who she is. Keaton's face--as she croaks her anguished answer: "Nothing, I'm nothing"--won't be easily forgotten….”

Jack Kroll
Newsweek, October 15, 1984

Hal Hinson

“In The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton attacks her role with the ferocious eagerness of someone who has spent the last few years pacing the sidelines, waiting for the chance to show her stuff. As Charlie, the eccentric actress who is used as bait in a honey trap…, Keaton is wired with emotion. It's been some time since an American actress has gone this far with a character. Nothing is held back; there's no protectiveness or hesitancy, and yet it's all in focus. The Little Drummer Girl is, at least in part, about an actress's attempt to be "real" in a situation where striking a false note would amost certainly cause her death. Keaton goes all the way in her identification with the danger of Charlie's pursuit of the real thing. Like Charlie, she acts as if her life depended on it.

“Keaton's performance in the film isn't exactly a revelation. In the movies she made with Woody Allen, Keaton turned her self-conscious neurasthenia into a seductive, comic style--neurotic chic. Later, in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and, especially, as Albert Finney's wounded partner in Shoot the Moon, she discovered something deeper in herself. As Faith, she was no longer a ditsy modern waif: Her head was impacted with dark, tangled emotions and, as her family crumbled around her, the sadness and resentment welled up inside her, rising to the surface like an ugly bruise.

“In The Little Drummer Girl, Keaton displays the same rawness and daring she showed in Shoot the Moon. Keaton isn't a polished technician like a number of modern movie actresses. Her acting isn't cool and tidy. At times, her style is clumsy and her thoughts seem hopelessly knotted up inside her head. But there's an immediacy to her screen work. In The Little Drummer Girl, she appears to discover her character's emotions just in the instant she steps before the camera, with their rough edges intact, and part of the excitement we experience from Keaton's performance comes from watching her fight through her awkwardness to get at what she's trying to express. She makes awkwardness a part of her style.

“… [D]irector George Roy Hill and writer Loring Mandel have made a few important changes in [LeCarre's] heroine…. Keaton's Charlie is American-born and not so young, and her experience in the world shows in the stray sprigs of gray in her hair and her droopy, melancholy eyes. Charlie isn't a soft, cuddly character with subtle, feminine wiles. She's aggressive, and not very easy to like. As an actress, Charlie is talented enough to claim most of the lead roles in… the tiny repertory company she works with in rural England, but the time in her career when stardom was still a possibility has passed, and she is more ambitious in her off-stage love affairs than in her work onstage. Charlie is sexually adventurous, but Keaton doesn't play her availbility to men as a sign of her modern, liberated attitudes. Charlie's seductive jousting with men is complex and double-edged--there's even some of the same compulsiveness and desperation in her come-ons that was visible in Keaton's earlier portrayal of Teresa [sic] Dunn in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In her scenes with Joseph (Yorgo Vogagis)… Keaton shows how much Charlie needs the approval of men. She uses sex, and the excitement of approaching a new man, in the same way she uses performing--as something to get her juices flowing and make her feel more alive, as a turn-on. [What a unusual use for sex!]

“Sex and acting are part of the same impulse for Charlie. They both stem from her drive to manipulate her emotions and put them on display. The same is true of her involvement in politics. The overlapping of politics and sex and theatre was at the heart of Le Carre's novel….

“The movie plays on the cliche that an actor's hold on reality is less than solid, and there is the suggestion that an actress's grip is even flimsier. . . . [Charlie] is a chameleon who takes on the coloration of whatever environment she's in. Her role-playing, both on and off stage, is so deeply ingrained in her personality that the truth about her own identity has become confused…. In the end, after she is unmasked as an imposter, Khalil asks her who she is. She replies, "Nobody. I'm nothing." When the performance is over, there is nothing left.

“Watching Diane Keaton as Charlie… , you may feel that the filmmakers are more successful in putting across Le Carre's story than they actually are….

“…. Keaton gives the routine, spy-thriller mechanics of The Little Drummer Girl a real, human center. But, outside her performance, the movie hardly exists at all.”

Hal Hinson
St. Louis, December 1984

Peter Travers ?

“Diane Keaton will be a long time living down this film version of John Le Carre's provocative best-seller…. Forget that the movie doesn't live up to the book (few movies do), but how can we forgive Keaton for a comically intense performance that distorts what may be Le Carre's most complex work?…. Onscreen Charlie, the plain-faced Brit, is transformed into the American Keaton acting as if she's doing a guest shot on Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Joseph… is played by newcomer Yorgo Voyagis, a charmless actor notable only for his paunch. How will these two ever convey the "seductiveness of terr" for those unfamiliar with the novel?…. Keaton is pure Hollywood. Her scenes in training at a PLO camp should send shivers down the spine; instead they come off like outtakes from Private Benjamin. Keaton can't stop trying to endear herself to the audience--a trick she honorably avoided in Reds and Shoot the Moon…. Keaton's star turn has transformed a good, perhaps great, book into an indefensibly bad movie.”

Peter Travers
People, date ?

David Thomson

“…. [S]he did not really grasp the actress-terrorist-lover called for in The Little Drummer Girl….”

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Third Edition (1994), p 391

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?]

Vincent Canby

 "What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't much time for actors to develop much in the way of plausibility of characterization. 

"In particular, Miss Keaton, a fine actress, is left high and dry by the screenplay. She never gets a chance to find the curious, confused heart of Charlie.... Everybody connected with the film behaves as if he were hanging on to the tail of a tiger and can't let go. They desperately clutch the material but never tame it. Perhaps 'The Little Drummer Girl', like Mr. le Carre's 'Tinker, Tinker Tailor Spy', could have been done successfully as a television mini-series...."

Vincent Canby, The New York Times, October 19, 1984