When David John Moore Cromwell began writing spy novels in the 1950s and ’60s, he had to do so under a pen name, John Le Carré, for the same reason that made his fiction so believable and compelling—he was a spy himself. Le Carré’s experience as an agent for Britain’s MI5 and MI6 agencies give his books an unfakeable verisimilitude, and, more importantly, a world-weary sense that the life of the intelligence operative is neither sexy nor glamorous.

His work is often held up in contrast to the James Bond books and movies, although the former (and the more recent Bonds) do have that tinge of bitterness and resignation that characterize his best work. Le Carré’s first real hit book was made into a film in 1965: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was directed by Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae) and it starred Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a tired British agent who goes on a dangerous mission into East Germany at the height of the Cold War.

This is spy drama at its most stripped-down and basic: barely any weapons (there’s only a couple of gunshots in the entire film), and largely comprised of tense scenes of men speaking in closed rooms. As in the best of Le Carré’s work, the suspense is psychological, a game of wits, not guns, and terribly jaded. Spies are “seedy, squalid bastards,” Burton says at one point, and you get the sense that this is a lot closer to the truth than James Bond ever got. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is out now in a new Criterion Collection DVD, with a second disc featuring a doc on Le Carré, an interview with him, a vintage interview with Burton and more.

Also recently out on Criterion, a drama showing yet another disheartening element of the Cold War’s many moral compromises: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek as the parents of an American journalist who disappeared in Chile’s 1973 coup.