“They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me. Little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands… civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives…” Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold / England Sandwich by Earl Brutus.

Although the film was released in 1965, this laserdisc cover to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold seems as though it could well belong to – or at least be a precursor of – Richard Burton’s work in the 1970s such as Villain, when he could lend his roles an air of bitter, corrupt, seediness (and indeed where the films themselves seem heavy with an air of such things).

Although more overtly bitter, in a way his work at this time reminds me of Robert Mitchum in the 1970s in The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (and possibly The Big Sleep – see Day #10/365a / Farewell My Lovely – see Day #3/365a) – the same sense of tiredness, of world weariness, of a man who knows somewhere deep down that his fingerholds are nolonger there…

Which brings me back to seediness, the converse/curious glamour it can have and this quote:

“Seediness has a very deep appeal… It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back…” Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps – stumbled upon I expect via the writing of Retromania author Simon Reynolds.

Peruse the current day sending forth of the film here.