Part 1

The first of the six parts belongs to the people Smiley has not yet met. It opens in Paris, where Maria Ostrakova, a Russian emigre of more than twenty years' standing, is stopped on her way home from work by a sweating, ginger-haired stranger who knows about the daughter she was made to leave behind in the 1950s. The girl, Alexandra, he says, has had her own difficulties with the Soviet authorities and may now be allowed to join her in Paris. He tells Ostrakova to collect passport photographs of the young woman from the Soviet embassy and to apply through the French. She obeys. Weeks pass, she hears nothing, and she becomes certain that the woman in the photographs is not her real daughter.

The letter she then writes reaches General Vladimir in London: an Estonian emigre who once held a Soviet general's rank, defected and worked for the British, and whom the Circus has long since stopped paying properly. He understands at once what Ostrakova has stumbled into. He sends Villem Craven, the son of an old colleague and a young lorry driver who runs to Germany, to Hamburg to collect a package from his lieutenant, and he tries to reach his old case officer at the Circus, not knowing that Smiley retired three years earlier. His approaches are met with scepticism, and by Toby Esterhase, the postman Hector of later parts, with flat refusal.

Vladimir's telephone call is taken by a junior duty officer, Nigel Mostyn, who follows procedure and arranges a safe-house meeting on Hampstead Heath that evening. Vladimir never reaches it. He is shot dead on the heath at close range, his face destroyed by a second bullet. Smiley is brought out of retirement to identify a man he once ran. The police have little to work with, and the one recoverable clue is a minicab receipt, which survives by discipline rather than luck: Vladimir worked to Moscow Rules and could shed everything he was carrying if he thought he was followed, which is why his coat was found all but empty.

At the safe house Oliver Lacon, the Cabinet Office's man at the Circus, tells Smiley what is actually wanted of him. It is not an investigation. "Tidy him up, keep us out of it, and don't wander," the brief runs. Mostyn, in confidence, passes on what Vladimir said on the telephone: that it concerned the Sandman, and that he had two proofs and could bring them with him. The Sandman is Karla, Smiley's opposite number at Moscow Centre. Smiley takes the case and walks away, having been asked to bury a man and having evidently decided to find out why he died.

The decision that shapes the hour is the one BFI Screenonline flags with an exclamation: Smiley does not appear for the first half-hour. The audience sits with Ostrakova and then with Vladimir, and understands the danger before the man who will have to deal with it walks on screen. This is a crime serial that opens with the victim rather than the investigator, and treats a killing as an administrative embarrassment rather than a wrong. Curd Jurgens, in his last screen role, plays Vladimir as both absurd and entirely serious, and Eileen Atkins carries the Paris opening almost alone. Where the part is slow, it is honestly slow: the objection that the plot takes too long to come into focus lands hardest on this first hour, in which the lead is absent for half of it.

The defence is that the slowness does a job. The whole machine is shown first, the approach, the courier, the empty coat and the receipt, so that when Smiley is finally told what is wanted, the viewer already knows he is being lied to. Nothing is resolved here. It ends as a burial job, and the rest of the serial is the account of Smiley refusing to carry it out.