‘The Pigeon Tunnel’: London Review

Dir. Errol Morris. US/UK, 2023. 93 mins.

It’s rare to see a crew list this extensive on a single-location, talking-head documentary with archive clips: but then again, The Pigeon Tunnel is a collaboration between master writer John LeCarre (or David Cornwell to give him his birth name) and master documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog Of War) with Phillip Glass scoring for the fourth time since 1988’s The Thin Blue Line. To be released posthumously – Cornwell died in 2020 at the age of 89 –  its visual riches speak partially to Morris’s distinctive style, and also to Apple’s deep pockets. Its themes, of duplicity and betrayal, scrape again at the wounds of the Cold War; particularly in the UK where the name of Kim Philby is still salt. Set for small-scale theatrical play and streaming on October 20 following a run of festival showcases, Morris’s hall of mirrors should figure prominently in awards chatter. It deals with familiar ground for Le Carre acolytes, but those new to his game will find all the source material in the extraordinary life and times documented here.

Morris’s hall of mirrors should figure prominently in awards chatter

Hardly a week goes by in the UK without some or other revelation in the Sunday newspapers about Cornwell’s private life — his name is catnip to a generation brought up on the Cold War and his books (and later movies and TV series) of spies and tradecraft, from 1963’s ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ onwards. The latest headline is about his repeated infidelities across two marriages but, thankfully, this is not covered here – although Cornwell admits from the outset that betrayal has been the dominant theme in his life. This is his last, extensive interview and Morris constructs it visually, as if his library was pierced by reflective shards of glass, and thematically, as a duel between interviewer and subject, drawn from Cornwell’s admission that, as a former MI5 and MI6 interrogator, the inquisitor always held all the cards.

Cornwell always claimed to be a minor cog in the workings of Britain’s declining secret services at the precise time Philby’s betrayal dealt them a death blow. ’Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ as well as ’Smiley’s People’, and, in part, ’The Honourable Schoolboy’ all deal with the Cambridge spy ring and the bleakness of the Cold War world where, as Le Carre says here, ”both sides invented the enemy they needed”. He was in Berlin when the wall went up, working under diplomatic cover having studied modern languages – in particular German – at Oxford, and his precision with words is always in evidence in this film (Morris’s questions seem almost sloppily phrased beside Cornwell’s prepared elegance).

Even that, fascinating though it is, pales in the face of the description of what got him there: the son of a ‘confidence trickster’, the convicted serial conman Ronnie Cornwell, David was abandoned by his mother at the age of five, never to be seen or spoken of again until adulthood, and brought up in a boarding school with cameo roles from a succession of ‘step-mothers’. Ronnie was a swindler and young David was often inveigled into his plans. “I wasn’t a dupe,” he clarifies. “I was invited to dupe, and I did.” (This will culminate in the film’s conclusion, when Ronnie tries to con his own by-now successful son.)

He was sent to Sherborne public school where he learned to pass as part of Britain’s post-War ruling classes, but the bills went unpaid and his father was frequently in prison. He was, in the end – after another setback of unpaid bills at Oxford, where he was rescued by a mentor involved in the secret services named Vivien Green — perfect fodder for recruiters. They look for, he explains, ’someone who’s a bit bad, but loyal’; someone in need of a father figure (he ended up writing Green into the character of George Smiley) – but Cornwell would end up betrayed by his new family as well. ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ was a furious protest whose success meant that he left the service, never to return. (Although he seems to have been very friendly with its head Nicholas Elliott for one so far down the rankings.)

Thanks to the Sunday papers, this is all well known – at least in the UK, where that post-war rot marked the end of empire. Seeing Cornwell describe it, however, is riveting in a film that is a class above the usual ripped-from-the-headlines documentaries about that time. (It could be viewed alongside ITV’s excellent A Spy Among Friends). Morris shoots the film in a jewelled amber palette, mostly in a library, which lends the film a sense of timelessness, although Le Carre is placed in front of a stark kitchen table for some chillier moments. Clips are plentiful, including Richard Burton in 1965’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Onscreen at least, Morris takes a writing credit on The Pigeon Tunnel as an adaptation of Le Carre’s own autobiography of the same name although, despite some reconstructions, this is an interview at heart. The ground it goes over is fertile and Morris’s dramatisations are redolent from the get-go, when the film’s title is explained — it refers to a shooting party attended by his conman father to which pigeons were funnelled over and over again. Their flight back to prison forms a repeated motif in the film, emphasised by Glass’s ostinatos. There’s at least one flight of fantasy too many, though, when Le Carre imagines a locked safe at ‘Circus’ headquarters which leads the film to Rudolf Hess’s mid-war flight to Scotland. But the budget extended to a whole Hungarian unit, and presumably it had to be spent somewhere.

Both verbally and in print, Le Carre is such an eloquent, redolent writer, and these are all his words, whether read from the pages of his autobiography, from his fiction, or his answers to Morris’s gentle probing. Phrases including ”this chap is a bit snifty” bring us back to another time. The film is clear that it is no bad thing those days are over, but it leaves behind a distinct sadness that this is the last we will hear from their dogged documentor, working in what he describes as his bubble, probing his past.