New Print Freed from the spy thriller's Bondage-to clichés of sexual adventure, and heroic notions of sacrifice and gain-The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is a portrait of the sordid, ulcer-producing and twice-thankless work of the double agent. The film is at once mesmerizing drama and near-documentary; director Martin Ritt records, from clandestine corners (as if he were the secret agent) the extraordinary and painful last episode in the life of John le Carré's jaded, spent spy Alec Leamas. Richard Burton plays Leamas so near the edge that, when he is assigned to pass himself off as a defector to East Germany, he nearly seems to believe the truth of his own demise. Little gray men in a big gray city, on both sides of the Berlin Wall, "a bunch of seedy squalid bastards, henpecked husbands, sadists, and drunkards": these are the heroes and the casualties of the Cold War, from whom Leamas can neither distinguish nor extricate himself. Bye bye, James Bond.