CHALK MARKS / COLUMN — If you craft a list of professionals who by virtue of their job knowingly undertake an effort they expect to go badly, it will be short. First responders at times of course, but for the most part, they train towards and anticipate success. A firefighter understands things can go wrong, but generally expects to put the fire out. The surgeon knows the risk of every incision, but in most cases, proceeds with the expectation that the outcome will be an improvement. There is one cadre of professionals however, that will leverage talent, skill, and effort in pursuit of something they suspect isn’t worth a white crayon and will likely end up bad and that’s operations officers.
When the stakes are high enough, ops officers risk it all in pursuit of the one percent possibility. Law enforcement officers, soldiers, teachers, and those who serve others understand the risk of their roles and the possibility of bad outcomes but lean into the odds that a well-executed plan will work out in the end. Not always, but often enough, ops officers are obligated to design and execute operations knowing that even if everything goes according to plan, they’re still screwed.
Let me offer you a fictional scenario. You live and work in an adversarial country where there is an active counterintelligence service that works to monitor foreign officials. You live undercover, but you have been around a bit and because you’re active, chances are your file moved to the suspected intel officer pile a while ago and is sliding towards the “confirmed” stack. You leave the gym one night and find a note on your windshield that reads something along the lines of, “I have money problems, but I have plans for the new System X. Major upgrade. I give you all technical details in return for X amount of money, but must be done one week from now, at X location at X time. This is a one-time offer.”
Your reaction to this note goes from “hell yes!” to “oh crap” in the span of a heartbeat. You know System X is of great interest, but you also know others understand this too, and this is more likely to be a provocation than a genuine volunteer. A set up. At best you are about to spin wheels on an operation collecting disinformation, and at worst you’re arrested on camera. In the middle is the more painful scenario in which you must stop doing all the cool clandestine things you have going because of the scrutiny this snipe hunt is going to bring down on you.
But information on System X is gold. It’s just too important. So, you do what good ops officers do. You plan your op and go forth, fingers crossed, because you just never know. And thus, another spy story is born.
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There will be chalk marks, dark alleys, drama and thrills, and in the end, no one will really care all that much about the System X details. It’s called a ‘McGuffin’. The drama is in the op. Most great espionage stories, fiction and non-fiction alike, start with a McGuffin.
Alfred Hitchcock, several of whose greatest films are based on McGuffins (The 39 Steps is an espionage classic) once said “The MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care.”
In no film is this truer than Ronin, the 1998 espionage classic directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Robert De Niro. Ronin is among the very best films at capturing the atmospherics, psychology, and anxiety inherit in espionage and its story is shot-gunned forward by my favorite film McGuffin – a figure skate case.
Robert De Niro’s character Sam, like most great film spies, is free of life’s detritus and able to live by only the unsurpassed creed of, “I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of,” which is almost the first line of the film. With dialogue written by David Mamet, De Niro gets to answer questions with questions, talk in clever circles, and essentially, turn clichés into weapons for two hours.
Sam plays to the spy film stereotype of “few words, extreme action,” but when crafted by Mamet, every word lands like a bullet and De Niro’s every glare can boil water. Part of what makes De Niro so good in this role is that like a Ronin, he is working alone. Sam is alone in his thoughts, alone in his mission, and alone in understanding (at least in part), what the hell is going on. Sam conveys more meaning with his posture and expressions than most of the dialogue among characters.
Sam is the film’s absolute center of gravity, but the supporting cast is elite. Jean Reno as Vincent is great as always but limited to giving De Niro an audience for his moods and wisdom. Natascha McElhone is “why wasn’t she a bigger movie star?” good as Diedre the Irish Ronin wrangler, and with a cast including Stellan Skaarsgard, Sean Bean and Katarina Witt, the film’s few narrative holes are happily overlooked.
The film’s first ten minutes, when all the shady characters (the titular Ronin) are brought together in a back-alley tavern is really a Chalk Marks dreamscape. Cobblestone streets, hidden staircases, back doors, foreign accents, cigarettes and overcoats – this is the espionage of my dreams and Frankenheimer sets a mood in the first ten minutes that carries the espionage energy to the end. The Manchurian Candidate is probably Frankenheimer’s most famous film, but I think Ronin is his best and the proof is in these first ten minutes.
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Ronin hits its tradecraft high water mark with multiple scenes dedicated to ops planning, and while the whiteboard and film camera casing might seem ancient in this digital world, good tradecraft never ages and the film is more interested in this sensibility than technology. Sam knows how to make an ops plan, but even more importantly for his mission he knows a bad one when he sees it.
Ronin is famous for its car chases and the action scenes in this movie paved the way for Jason Bourne and others in same genre. They are raw, real and pure asphalt carnage, with the choreography of one extended wrong way traffic sequence unequaled to this day. Also unsurpassed is a self-surgery scene, with mirrored camera angles and acting that are the height of craftmanship. I would make the case that this scene is as good as anything De Niro does in the Godfather and Heat, and while you can disagree, please understand you are wrong.
I expected the Katarina Witt role to have aged poorly, but I still love it. If you planned your first ops (or college road trips) using tracing paper and paper maps, you will know what a big deal Witt was for a window of time. At the height of her post Olympics fame, it did not seem at all ridiculous to have her in a De Niro film but casting her as an East German who authorities are desperate to keep from defecting, and as a Russian pawn for Russian villains, is just the type of thumb in your eye subversion where Ronin excels.
Building off the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (the Ark) and Pulp Fiction (the briefcase), Ronin also hit the last big wave of McGuffin movies for a while and rode it to the beach. 25 years on, there is a leading theory of what was in the case, loosely implied late in the film, but I promise you first time watchers don’t particular care by the end, and that was precisely the point and magic of Ronin. De Niro’s character did spy stuff because espionage needed doing and he says several times during the film that he doesn’t know what was in the case and he didn’t care. The audience suspects there is more to it than that, and there is, but it’s not about the McGuffin.
Once upon a time, way back when political defectors only went east to west, I had my own System X McGuffin situation, and a risky street meeting was on the whiteboard. A senior officer from Washington came out and asked me how I was doing. I told him I was excited; it was risky, but I thought we had a good plan. I asked him in return what he thought, and with no hesitation and a stone face he said, “I think you should have your affairs in order.” He didn’t mean my last will of course, but that I should be prepared for trouble and that my McGuffin was more likely a one-way ticket home than the Holy Grail.
So like Sam, but with none of the killer one-liners, I just went out and did what needed doing, with no idea what was in the case. To this day, I couldn’t tell you a thing about my version of System X, but I could (in theory) tell you about every chalk mark, park bench and clandestine meeting along the way because that is where the adventure was.
So, go chase a McGuffin and queue up Ronin for a great spy adventure, and like always, here’s an Ops plan to get you going:
- Primary viewing window: Home, with teens if you have them – you will find few films from 1998 that will keep their interest like this one. (Note: You may need to explain Katarina Witt, and why that’s not weird.)
- Alternate viewing window: Blu-Ray DVD version, with the fantastic Frankenheimer commentary
- Beverage: Coffee and always watch where you place your mug
- Snacks: Pastries and cigarettes
- Post viewing audible: The Rewatchables podcast – Ronin with Bill Simmons; great conversation about all the background that makes this film so good
- Post viewing read: Frank Miller’s Ronin; a graphic novel similar only in spirit but a masterwork of the form
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