The Deadly affair (1966)

The Deadly Affair is a 1966 British espionage-thriller film, based John le Carré's first novel Call for the Dead. The film stars James Mason, Harry Andrews, Simone Signoret and Maximilian Schell and was directed by Sidney Lumet from a script by Paul Dehn. In it George Smiley, the central character of the novel and many other of le Carré's books, is renamed Charles Dobbs. The soundtrack was composed by Quincy Jones, and the bossa nova theme song, "Who Needs Forever," is performed by Astrud Gilberto.

Charles Dobbs (James Mason) is a British secret agent investigating the apparent suicide of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan. Dobbs suspects that Fennan's wife, Elsa (Simone Signoret), a survivor of an extermination camp, might have some clues, but other officials want Dobbs to drop the case. Dobbs hires a retired police inspector, Mendel (Harry Andrews), to quietly make inquiries. As they uncover some horrible implications, Dobbs also discovers that his wife Ann (Harriet Andersson) has been having an affair with a colleague, Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell).

Director Sidney Lumet said of James Mason "I always thought he was one of the best actors who ever lived. Whatever you gave him to do he would take it, assimilate it and then make it his own. The technique was rock solid, and I fell in love with him as an actor, so every time I came across a script I wanted to direct I would start to read it thinking is there anything here for James? He had no sense of stardom at all. He wanted good billing and the best money he could get, but then all he ever thought about was how to play the part. In that sense he reminded me more of an actor in a theatre repertory ensemble than a movie star, and it was what made him so good." Lumet also directed Mason in The Sea Gull (1968), Child's Play (1972) and The Verdict (1982).

Location shooting for The Deadly Affair took place in London, in St. James Park, at the Balloon Tavern and the Chelsea Embankment in Chelsea, in Clapham and Barnes, and in Twickenham.

Director of photography Freddie Young's technique of pre-exposing the colour film negative to a small, controlled amount of light (known as "flashing" or "pre-fogging") in order to create a muted colour pallette was first used in this film. Lumet called the result "colorless color" and it proved influential, being used by other cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond on McCabe and Mrs. Miller.