cold war days; Joan Juliet Buck savors buttoned-down, old-time romance in two bold new shows.(Mad Men; Wilderness of Mirrors)(Television program review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Smoky bars. Big cars. High stakes. Cold War. A new series on AMC and a stunning movie on TNT are both set in the days when men were accountable to God, Mammon, and Country, and needed triple martinis to get through their daily lies. The Company, adapted as a three-part movie from Robert Littell's book about the CIA and directed by Mikael Salomon, is one of the best spy films ever. More coherent than The Good Shepherd, livelier than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, more believable than any James Bond, The Company is great entertainment. With a mixture of romance and bitterness, it tracks the Central Intelligence Agency from the fifties to the end of the Soviet Empire, simplifies its skirmishes with the KGB, and makes the famous "Wilderness of Mirrors" created by disinformation, for once, comprehensible. Chris O'Donnell stars as the fictional Jack McCauliffe, recruited at Yale along with his best pal, Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola). McCauliffe-sweet, square, and blond-is in on every tragic misstep of the CIA: the Hungarian uprising, the failed assassination of Castro and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, the messy imprisonment of a suspected mole. Alfred Molina as our (fictional) man in Berlin, Harvey Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer, is a sloppy and majestic figure-cursing, drinking, speaking in a Brando mumble. Michael Keaton uses a nasal and deliberate delivery to vanish inside the person of the weird but true head of ...