User reviews

This 1984 film based on John Le Carre's book could well have been written just a few days ago. The confrontation between Israel and Palestine has not changed over the years although the explosive device chosen in the film happens to be a nasty bomb hidden in a suit case and detonated at a distance. Much of the excitement of the story seems to revolve around the preparation and delivery of the suit cases and the spy and counter spy activities.

My reason for choosing this film was to see more of the work of Klaus Kinski (an explosive personality if ever there was one) but in this film he was very much in control. In the role of Kurtz he is responsible for selecting Charlie (Diane Keaton) to spy among the Palestinians. Charlie being a superb actress could handle the job expertly using her feminine charms.

The film has a very large cast...too large in fact...and one tends to get lost amongst all the characters trying to remember which are the Israelis and which are the Palestinians.

The film literally starts with a bang and the search is on to find the perpetrators. As the tension mounts and the bombs explode, one keeps asking, "Who will be next?"

One cannot visualize a happy ending for such a film. While it makes exciting viewing the tragedy is that lives are still being lost each day as the confrontation continues and hopes of peace seem to become even more remote.

Having read the intriguing novel beforehand, I had looked forward to a film adaption. At that time I always imagined Andrea McArdle, a young Broadway stage actress and the original "Annie" was not only the right age, but had the look and personality of Charlie as described in the book.

Sadly, the casting of Diane Keaton was just a disaster. A choice the entire production never could overcome. Although a good actress, Keaton was about 15 years too old for the role of an ingénue who becomes the obsession of a terrorist, and her pronounced New York accent was too much at times.

The movie follows the novel very closely, perhaps too closely for it's own good. It should nave been about 20 minutes shorter. Still, even at it's full length, the screenplay misses the most interesting moment in the book, where the reader is left to ponder if Charlie has not only infiltrated, but, truly joined the "movement" and was ready to kill for the terrorist group.

The actual production seemed a bit on the cheap side. It appears the director wanted a look of reality, but by 80s standards that meant filming on location using real streets with little local activity to get in the way.

The rest of the cast, except for Klaus Kinski's star turn is totally forgettable.

Finally, over the years I've come to realize, The Little Drummer Girl was a story that was best served on the written page. Too much of the story is internalized in Charlie's mind, and that personal struggle is not easily translated to film.

This film is detailed and occasionally harsh, but told by a master storyteller. the director has modified the John LeCarre novel somewhat, but weaves a strong story. It's a little hard to follow if you don't know much about the world of Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but provides quite an education by its end.

It begins with the assassination (bombing) of an Israeli diplomat and family and then jumps to an American stage actress, Charlie (Diane Keaton), who's currently living in Britain. She is ideologically a supporter of the Palestinian cause. She has a problem with falling in love easily and sympathizing with her lover. You begin to see the wheels turning in Israeli intelligence as they research and try to react to this most recent terrorist bombing.

They skillfully recruit/seduce her by pretending to support the Palestinian movement. To be effective in their scheme, they need someone authentic. They try to get under her skin and into her personal psyche (why she is an actress, pain in her life). Klaus Kinski is superb as the head of the Israeli intelligence effort.

After feeling more confident, they put her work to infiltrate the Palestinian-backed terrorist camps to ultimately get to the almost impossible to find bomber Khalil. This involves serious physical/military training. She excels and is given more and more trusted tasks as the story progresses. The story takes many twists and is very detailed and realistic in it's portrayal of both sides. It gets a little heavy, but is fascinating to watch unfold even a second time.

I give it a solid recommendation.

It's 1981 West Germany. Katrin delivers a bomb made by mysterious PLO bomb-maker Khalil killing an Israeli diplomat and his family. Charlie (Diane Keaton) is a naive pro-Palestinian actress. She is in Greece to do a job. When she spots Joseph, she believes him to be the masked Palestinian spokesman whose meeting she attended. He's actually an Israeli Mossad agent and they had taken the real masked man who is Khalil's brother Michel. The whole Greece trip is an Israeli trick. They reveal themselves to her and Martin Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) recruits her to be the brother's girlfriend to infiltrate Khalil's group.

John le Carré's brand of espionage stories is often muddled. His world is a murky chaotic vision where questionable things are done which are often not the right course of action. Having said that, I don't understand why the Israelis would ever recruit Charlie. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't see Charlie helping the Israelis or ever believe them enough to really help them. They don't need the recruit to be Jewish, just not anti-Israeli. It might make sense if they pretend to be another terrorist group hoping to connect to Khalil. It's simply hard to understand the Israeli's course of action. Charlie's motivation for her journey is way too twisty. If one can ignore the questionable motivations, the plot is an intriguing twisty affair.

Professional intelligence case workers appeal to four principal motives to recruit their agents: Money, Ideology, Compromise (meaning blackmail), and Ego, sometimes referred to by the acronym MICE. In THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL, we see a fifth motive used: Screenwriter's Fiat.

Charlie, a little pro-Palestinian Jane Fonda wannabe, is kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad, humiliated, and offered the job of spying on Palestinian terrorists. She accepts because, um, because, well, the screenwriter says so. Okay, so there's a vague effort to make us believe that Charlie's in love with one of the Mossad agents, but since her attraction to him was based entirely on the belief that he was a romantic, dashing leader of the Palestinian `revolution,' there's no basis for her to continue being attracted to him once she learns he's a spy for the Israelis whom she hates.

I'm not sure any woman in the world is quite so easily manipulated as Charlie in this movie. If such a woman really exists anywhere, why on earth would anyone want her as an intelligence agent? Anyone who can be convinced to change sides that easily once can surely be convinced to do so a second time. You wouldn't dare let her out of your sight for ten seconds, and as for allowing her to join a Palestinian terrorist training camp, where she'd be out of sight and in the presence of her old friends for months on end, forget about it. It's absurd. If I were politically correct, I would call it a misogynist movie, but that would probably be unfair. There's no evidence that director George Roy Hill imagined Charlie's weakness and stupidity to be typical of all women.

It's a shame that Charlie is neither a believable nor a likeable heroine, because in every other respect THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a great spy movie. I can't say precisely how realistic it is technically, but it feels authentic at every turn. The brutal interrogations of the captured terrorist, and the intense multilayered surveillance of Charlie ring very true. There's no one-man-army James Bond crap here; the Israelis assign a full squad of spies to every job. More importantly it gives us the psychological feel of the espionage profession. The stock in trade of professional spies is the betrayal of loyalty and the abuse of friendship. Naturally, this does not make for likeable characters, however much one may admire the cause for which they work. Hill does not attempt to sugarcoat this; he shows it to us as it is.

Diane Keaton should not be blamed for failing to make her ridiculous character convincing; she is clearly doing the best she can, and quite probably the best that anyone could have. Klaus Kinski steals every scene he gets as Mossad master agent Marty Kurtz. David Suchet gets a fine small role as a terrorist thug.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is a fine example of how outstanding supporting performances, dedication, and sincerity (you rarely find movies this honest in Hollywood anymore) can rescue a movie whose protagonist is badly written. It's not half the movie it could have been, but it's a good movie anyway.

Rating: **½ out of ****.

Recommendation: See it on video or DVD with your friends.

Apart from a few curious departures from Le Carre's book of the same name the main thing wrong with this film is the casting of Diane Keaton as Charlie. Why the producers saw fit to use a relatively minor American actress to play the key role in this very strong story is something of a mystery, particularly when so many fine European actors were available at the time. Keaton strives to do her best but remains unconvincing throughout the play and her inadequacies are, unfortunately, highlighted by the superb performances from the rest of the stellar cast. Notwithstanding, the film is still well worth watching if only for the performances of Klaus Kinski and the rest of the cast. Plus the strong story line tends to over-ride some of the casting flaws. Moreover, since the film was made in the 1980's it is grittily realistic and doesn't suffer from the mawkish revisionism of recent films about international terrorism. Note: the earlier commentator who wondered why the character of Charlie would have been selected as a intelligence agent, seems to have missed the main point of the story. Charlie wasn't an agent - she was bait.

The novel by John Le Carré is the best spy novel ever written. It is a work of pure genius and it elevates the genre to literature. Daniel Silva has made a career out of basically borrowing everything from this book for his Gabriel Allon series.

Forget about the fact that she's a terrible actress, but Diane Keaton is just too old for the part. Charlie was a very young and hip woman, not a middle-aged dork...and she was English. She isn't even hot enough for the role. In the movie she's obviously too old for the Arab terrorist Michel who she was supposed to be involved with. Yorgo Voyagis as Joseph was also a little too old for the part and he is just too much of a Rock Hudson lookalike for my tastes. At least he could have lost the porn star moustache.

The best bit of casting was Klaus Kinski as Kurtz.

If ever a movie needs to be remade it would be this excellent story.

Update: It has been remade as a TV series which better suits the novel. The TV series is better, not great, but better.

It's been years since I've seen this movie (or read the book, which I did also), and I'm prompted to say something only because I'm reading a new novel, set in Sarajevo, on roughly the same subject, which brings it all to mind. Quite simply, Diane Keaton (whom I like, sometimes) was abysmally miscast, and since the movie turned around her it hadn't a chance. She was too old, too personally quirky, too American. Charlie is a character whose complexity is that of youthful dumbness mixed with superficial knowingness. There are lot of actresses who could have done it (Natasha Richardson might have been one of them, which would certainly have been interesting), but Keaton wasn't one of them.

This is the best movie ever made about counter-terrorism. John LeCarre had obviously done his homework on Operation "Wrath of God," the Israeli operation to track down and eliminate the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, when he wrote the book this film was based on. The fact that both the 1972 Olympics were in Germany and much of the film is set (and filmed) in Germany only scratches the surface of the parallels. The trade-craft of covert operations in "The Little Drummer Girl" is so realistic the picture could be used as a training film. Klaus Kinski is particularly excellent as the chief of the Mossad team. I hope to see "The Little Drummer Girl" on DVD soon.

This movie offers a good mixture of action and international intrigue. It is a refreshing departure from the sex and violence offered by other spy movies, particularly the James Bond films. There are no amazing gadgets or blond bomb shells in this film. In their place, we are offered an intriguing plot with interesting moral questions, and an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both sides of the fence. In this film, the lines between good guys and bad guys blur, just as they often do in real life. Furthermore, the performances, especially those of Klaus Kinski (appearing in a good movie for once) and Diane Keaton are good.

John Le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell) clearly had Judy Davis (not Vanessa Redgrave, as some would maintain) in mind to play the role of Charlie when he wrote Little Drummer Girl.

I have been a fan of John Le Carré since his first book, Call for the Dead in 1961. I have read all of his works and I have seen all the TV and movie adaptations. When he writes a book or story he is thinking of certain actors that will (can) bring his characters to life.

I must admit that the script and casting for Little Drummer Girl were good enough, however, casting Diane Keaton in a part that was intended for Judy Davis (a powerful actor) destroyed most of the potential of a movie that could have garnered several Academy Awards. Diane Keaton is a nice, sweet little woman, and she was pleasant in Annie Hall, and that is all that she is capable of doing. Diane Keaton playing Charlie, a radical left-wing English actress was absurd and, at best, a travesty, of the original story.

It was an ordeal watching Diane Keaton in this movie, missing 90 percent of the potential of the part she was given!

The director is weak, the original story is great. What can I say, I'm an avid le Carre fan! To paraphrase Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine in Deathrap, 1982) it's a story so good a bad director can't f**k it up. Check out the other comments, I agree with them. Klaus Kinski is great, he chews the scenery, and the supporting cast are all mini-gems. I was trying to decide if I liked Yorgo Voyagis, and I do. He may be too still for some people, but I believe Diane when she falls in love with him. And he has haunted eyes when he has to do bad things which are necessary for the Cause. Diane Keaton is so miscast. She's too old, she can't be an American doing St. Joan in England! She's good, but she can't be Charlie, she just can't. Maybe Helena Bonham-Carter, or Vanessa Redgrave when she was young, oh heck, there must be hundreds of english actresses slavering for this role at that time.

Nevertheless, I love the movie despite Diane Keaton (she does a good job, it's just I can't buy her in the role!).

Diane Keaton stars as an actress who falls for a Palestinian terrorist, only to discover that he's really a Mosad agent posing as a Palestinian terrorist. They want to recruit her to pose as the girlfriend of the real terrorist in order to trap his brother, who is a bigger and badder terrorist. One of a slew of mediocre John le Carré adaptations. The film takes an excessively complex and elliptical approach to unveiling the plot, leaving to viewer puzzled for at least an hour of it's 2 hour running time. Keaton feels miscast, but Klaus Kinski adds quite a bit of life to the proceedings as the main Mosad agent. An extremely young Bill Nighy pops in and out as Keaton's friend.

I've read many, but not all, of Le Carré's novels, and this is one that I missed. I've noticed that most people who have read the book and seen the movie preferred the book. They mention that the book develops tremendous nuance in the character of Charlie (Diane Keaton in the film) and especially in her psychological stress and conflicted loyalties. They offer many other critiques as well, mostly about the choice of Diane Keaton. I don't have that sense of disappointment, since I didn't read the book and liked the movie. The film is a "classic" espionage thriller - and a good one - with an intricate plot, tremendous tension and sense of danger, and great location sets. Klaus Kinski is riveting in a supporting role, and there are many fine supporting actors. Diane Keaton was a controversial choice, but she does a great job in many parts of the film, and her last 15 minutes especially are a tour de force.

Recently I watched the new miniseries of this story. It was pretty good, well produced, and it made me into a big fan of Florence Pugh. It also made me curious to go back and watch this original version from 1984. I expected it to suck, but I really think it holds up well. (Apart from the comical 1980s hairstyles and fashions.)

As time has gone on, Diane Keaton has become a one-note actress who just plays herself over and over. But there was a time when she was actually trying. In this film, she is trying, and she is really pretty good. Her acting in the last 15 minutes is top notch. I bought it.

Of course the real standout in this film is Klaus Kinski. In every scene he's in, you can't take your eyes off him. He generates electricity like a power plant! Just watch him answer the phone -- he does it with 100% intention. You soon realize Charley (the protagonist) is a pawn, being deftly, delicately handled by a world-class manipulator.

I imagine at the time it was a pretty radical undertaking: to show both sides as heroes and villains. Now of course it must be viewed as a historical artifact. But one worth seeing.

This movie's not for the timid but it is for those who like realism, who enjoy the twists and turns of intrigue and who are riveted by intricacies in plot development. It's a movie which reveals what it's all about to the heroine and viewers only as the plot develops and that's refreshingly like life.

To coin a phrase, a true 'hidden gem'.

Diane Keaton, who's one of those famous actresses where you can hardly remember any of their films, plays a thespian hired to be the girlfriend of a dead terrorist, in a slick, uncompromising thriller which starts off slow but gets progressively more exciting as it goes on.

The acting is top notch, the unlikely plot advances in such a well delivered way to make even the most implausible of events believable and the bittersweet ending is one I'll remember for a long time. It's two hours of riveting suspense and action, and worth far more than it's current status as a unknown treasure. 7/10

A perfect movie.

A perfect adaptation of the Cornwell/LeCarre novel. Perhaps the movie might be hard to follow if one had not read the novel; I don't know.

A perfect lesson in the War on Terror. As timely as when it was made. Maybe more so.

My only complaint: Why no DVD?

An English actress, who is widely known for being adherent of Palestinian, is enlisted by the Israelis to catch one of the most dangerous Palestinian terrorists.

A best-selling spy novel (allegedly based on Vanessa Redgrave) from the pen of an exceptionally complex and downbeat author turns to be a superficially very slick, fast-paced and action-packed but vaguely unsatisfactory, long-winded thriller that cheats on both faithful adaptation and real political background. Worth watching for its technical flair and professional handling all round, the content has lost somewhere among the bloodshed.