With the russian song at the Christmas party, it's English humour , and irony.

The Alec Guinness BBC production of Tinker Tailor and the sequel Smileys People are probably the finest pieces of TV drama ever made.. you should react to them, nobody else has

This is the role Gary Oldman had the most stress over playing, even more than Churchill. He grew up loving Mr. Smiley and felt tremendous pressure to do right by the character. I think he turned in perhaps his finest performance. Thanks for reacting to this gem of a movie!

The song is ironic. We do love a little irony over here.

41:32 - he warned him because he loved him. The key theme of this movie is the personal relationships are the real intelligence, far more important than details of naval operations, and that spies and politicians are humans motivated by human emotions, not programmable machines. If you can understand what people really care about, you can manipulate them perfectly.

EDIT: Oh! You figured it out a moment later. Never mind.

Smiley didn't figure out it was Hayden. He knew that whoever the mole was was going to have to show up at that safe house, but he didn't know which one it was. He may have had suspicions, but he needed to set up the meet at the house to be sure. Actually Karla was right that Smiley wouldn't see Hayden clearly if Hayden was having an affair with Anne, because then Smiley wouldn't want the mole to be Hayden. It would upset Anne and make her feel like a fool and Karla knew enough about Smiley's character to know he wouldn't want that because in spite of everything Smiley loves Anne. It helps to read the book, or see the TV series, which is also brilliant by the way.

Some trivia for those interested: John le Carré (pen name for David Cornwell) was a real spy, and Haydon is loosely based on Kim Philby - a British double agent and member of the Cambridge Five, a group of Soviet defectors and privately educated spies who were recruited out of the upper class universities of Oxford and Cambridge by MI5 and MI6 but were convinced and in some cases blackmailed into betraying them to the Soviets; Haydon's bisexuality is a nod to the fact many double agents were honey trapped or coerced into compliance over being outed as gay at a time when that was still illegal in Britain. Philby blew the cover identities of many British agents before he was eventually found out, including le Carré's, ending his spy career.

The Christmas Party is part dark British humour and part in order to know one’s enemy, one must think like one’s enemy. So instead of having Santa giving out gifts, it’s Stalin and that’s why they sang the Soviet national anthem.
The circus is the internal nickname they use for MI6.

In the 1950s and 60s, there was a group of spies in British Intelligence. Burgess and MacLean were the first two who managed to extricate themselves (from diplomatic cover in Washington, D.C.).  Then, in 1963, Kim Philby defected to Moscow, blowing the covers of most spies who worked for the Circus. One of the people whose cover was blown was David Cornwell who had published three novels under the pseudonym John LeCarre.  

This novel, written a decade later, was his way of working out some of the questions he still had about Philby's betrayal.

Prideaux in the film has two deep loves/loyalties, one to his country and by extension the service; the other to Bill Hayden. When Hayden betrayed his country, it was the one unforgivable thing in Prideaux's eyes. Going to Moscow would have given Hayden a certain luxury, a reward for being a traitor, and Prideaux just couldn't stomach that.

the russian party was a bit of christmas fun - a kind of 'spy humour'

”Smiley is suspicious, Percy!”

This movie is amazing. It's one of those movies that gets better when you rewatch it. It gives you time to study the minutiae of the characters and it just showcases the qualities of the cast so well.

Raw, gritty & realistic. No unnecessary explosions or over the top gadgets. Just a rock solid story line that leaves you no choice but to immerse.

The best spy movie of all time is based on another le Carre novel… ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’, starring Richard Burton.  It's set in the days when George Smiley was just a junior functionary and he makes barely a cameo appearance in the story.  But Burton’s Alec Leamas is utterly compelling.

The party Russian song - British ironic humour, taking the piss out of your enemy by dressing Stalin as Santa which was the most unlikely thing you would ever see. I believe Hayden replied in Arabic, they were just showing off their language skills.

My father was an exchange officer with MI-5 in the late 1960s. He always said that LeCarre got it right, unlike Fleming with Bond, because "spies are boring little men in trench coats with bad breath ."  Dad also described what SCIFs looked like in the 60s, and I was thrilled when I saw them in this movie, just as he described.

1970s London really felt that drab.  It had been vibrant in the 1960s and became vibrant again in the early 1980s.

I've swum in the Hampstead Heath pond.

Finally, a real good movie gets reacted to. The storytelling, the cast, the camera, the vibe, name it, everything is just awesome.

This is what i call a procedual spy story and i love that, especially when they are set in the cold war era.

Great reaction, this film doesn't get the love it deserves imo. Its nice to see reactions to it. The Christmas Party was a mix of humour and sarcasm. Everyone in that department would be a Russia expert, many would be graduates of Eastern Language Courses. There is a University in London called SOAS, that specialises in language and culture studies and it, and many other language schools, are regularly visited by the security services looking for graduates to join MI6. Language graduates are excellent analysts given their familiarity with their chosen country's culture. Singing the Anthem to the Soviet Union at the Christmas Party would be office humour.

Yay! This is one of my favorite movies of all time. 🙂