The Little Drummer Girl - Warner Archive Collection

George Roy Hill is one of those sturdy studio directors that I’ve been revisiting as of late. His Slap Shot is among my favorite movies, delightful in the ways it eschews old-school male antics and newer, self-effacing, emasculating comedy. While The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are certainly the more well-known entries in the director’s career, I grew up on watching Slap Shot and taking with me the kind of hilarity that can come when treating masculinity like the joke it is. That’s part of why The Little Drummer Girl comes off as so disappointing. I cannot remember the last time I saw a studio film that was so mismatched in terms of casting, plotting, cinematography and direction. What I found to be labyrinthine in Park Chan-wook’s 2018 miniseries adaptation I find completely flat and undeserved here.

The Little Drummer Girl takes place in Europe and the Middle East with an attempt by Israel’s Mossad agents to flush out a Palestinian Liberation Organization bomber named Khalil (Sami Frey). To do this, Mossad’s Martin Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) hatches a plan to use an anti-Zionist American actress named Charlie (Diane Keaton) to infiltrate the Palestinian resistance and report her findings back to Mossad. Naturally, Charlie falls in love with Khalil and decides to become a double agent. As her anti-Zionist leanings are challenged by Khalil’s murder of Israelis, the truth is destined to come out unless Charlie can control herself.

Diane Keaton’s one of our leading American actresses, and it pains me to say that she is terribly miscast in this film. You can owe that a bit to the haphazard screenplay that jettisons many of the finite details of le Carré’s novel in exchange for easy Hollywood conclusions, but you can also tell she’s working up against a film that lacks the kind of tense, incendiary focus required in spy dramas of this sort. The fact that Charlie is a pathological liar is played much too straight here, and George Roy Hill’s standard directing doesn’t have the interiority required to make this adaptation worth it. Not to mention that the incendiary politics it explores have been completely softened. Klaus Kinski as a Mossad agent? It has the inadvertent effect of making it clear that Mossad is the wrong group to trust in Charlie’s situation.

Part of what drew me to visit The Little Drummer Girl is, of course, the turmoil that’s currently going on in Gaza. Le Carré never made easy work of these geopolitical situations, opting to show just how inhuman and individual it can be to hide your complete self to tell a lie. The patient, slow manipulation of Charlie is terribly mishandled in the film, and it reduces the impact of the genuinely introspective look at Palestinian and Israeli relations le Carré brought out in the novel. Thus, everything is kind of turned into binary and lacks the tension created by that patience. Le Carré was a master at digging into the tragedy of real-life atrocities to find the phenomena behind them, yet here everything is staid and unclear.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-rays
The Little Drummer Girl comes home from the war with a single-disc (BD50) Blu-ray release from Warner Archive. Housed in a standard blue amaray case, the Blu-ray boots up to a standard menu screen with options to turn on subtitles, watch a trailer and play the film.

Alright, time for some disappointing news. The Little Drummer Girl is presented here in 1080p from what seems like an older HD master, thus what we get here is a presentation that lacks the detail and grain retention achieved by a new scan. That’s not to say that it’s a displeasing experience, as film grain still looks natural, colors are tuned okay and there isn’t much damage to note. It’s just that the presentation is often soft and lacks fine detail. If you’re a fan of the film already, then you won’t need much convincing to pick this one up, but it’s still definitely a middling transfer supported by a decent encode. 

As for audio, we get a single DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono mix that’s good in presentation but lacking in emotive force. You’d figure a spy film that’s supposed to be filled with tension and explosions would have a bit more boisterous of a track, but everything here is still resolved fine and music and dialogue are mixed well. There’s no damage to note here either.

As for supplements, we get a single trailer presented in HD from what looks to be an SD source.

• Trailer (HD 1:49)

George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl disappoints where it should deepen your love for spy dramas and the real-life political complications that inform them. The new 1080p presentation on this Warner Archive Blu-ray release is decent but still leaves much to be desired given no new scan or restoration was performed. There’s a single supplement as well, thus this release is For Fans Only. 

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