Cinema is such a delicate art. It is a combination of so many different factors, including story, screenplay, direction, design, performance, and production. When all of these factors work in tandem, more often that not something truly wonderful can occur. If just one factor is sufficiently out of step, poorly considered, or unexpectedly weak, the entire production can collapse like a house of cards.

Let us talk about The Little Drummer Girl (1984).

This film, directed by George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), adapts the 1983 John Le Carre novel of the same name. In the novel Charlie, a young English actress with pro-Palestinian leanings, is lured in by the Israeli secret service to go undercover as a double agent and help track down a Palestinian terrorist. It is a superb literary thriller that comes rich with detail and realism, and which takes a surprisingly even position on the Israel-Palestine conflict as it was in the 1970s.

It is a reasonably long novel, running more than 400 pages in most editions, and it would present any screenwriter with a major challenge in adapting it to the screen. It is also comparatively light on incident in its early sections, only picking up and presenting much in the way of Hollywood-style action at the very end. American playwright Loring Mandell actually does a sensational job for Hill’s film version, condensing a complex set of characters in a manner that is logical, comparatively easy to follow, and suitably dramatic. Really there is only one serious flaw – but it is a big one, as I have already implied.

In the novel, Charlie is a 26-year-old English stage actor who has enthusiastically adopted a left-wing but politically naïve attitude to the world. The fragility of her beliefs is made apparently with the ease with which Israeli spymaster Martin Kurtz convinces her to switch sides. A 2018 BBC/AMC television serial cast Florence Pugh in the role: then 22 years old, Pugh captured the requirements of the character perfectly.

For the 1984 film, Diane Keaton was cast in the role. It was part of a number of dramatic roles she would take up in the 1980s, in large part to avoid being typecast following the Woody Allen comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). Sadly, and much to the film’s great misfortune, she was entirely unsuitable for the role as scripted. Concessions were clearly made to accommodate Keaton: the character shifts from an English actor to an American one living in England, and at 38 years old Keaton was clearly too old for the part. While the character’s backstory has been changed from the book, the personality and demeanour were retained. Behaviour that would have been believable in a younger woman – her romantic passion, or gushing naïveté – become trite and unconvincing in a woman of almost 40. It shatters the character and, quite frankly, Hill’s film never recovers.

The supporting cast are generally very good – Klaus Kinski is wonderful as Kurtz, as is Yorgo Voyagis as Israeli agent Joseph – but they simply are not in a place to repair damage done by Keaton’s wildly impulsive, over-the-top performance. The film is betrayed by Keaton, and Keaton is betrayed by the screenplay – but even that cannot take the blame because she simply should never have been cast in the first place.

The Little Drummer Girl appears to have largely been forgotten, and in all honesty that is likely for the best. Viewers wanting to see Le Carre’s novel on screen are much, much better served watching the television adaptation instead – directed by the more talented and interesting Park Chan-wook and starring the infinitely more appropriate Florence Pugh.