The Ipcress File
1965
Produced by Harry Saltzman
Directed by Sidney Furie
Based on the novel by Len Deighton
Screenplay by Bill Canaway & James Doran
Music by John Barry
CAST
Michael Caine – Harry Palmer
Nigel Green – Major Dolby
Guy Doleman – Colonel H.L. Ross
Sue Lloyd – Jean Courtney
Gordon Jackson – Jock Carswell
Aubrey Richards – Dr Radcliffe
Frank Gatliff- Bluejay
Thoas Baptiste- Barney, American agent
Oliver MacGrevy- Housemartin
Freda Bamford- Alice
Pauline Winter – Charlady
Stanley Meadows – Inspector Pat Keightley
The 60s Retrospective series continues …
UK release, March 1965, USA release August 1965
She placed the cylindrical red package with its white lettering on the table between us. I stared at it. Her hand reached out. A flick of the wrist. It was open. A dingy brown disc rolled onto her blue and white willow pattern plate. It was a wholemeal digestive biscuit. I knew she wanted me to find the book.
‘You want me to find the book,’ I said.
I don’t care what you say. When a library’s that big. It takes time. I’d studied those shelves. You may not consider that a fit job for a fully-grown male, but someone had to do it. I knew where the Ian Flemings were. I knew where the John Le Carres were. It took a moment to locate the Len Deightons. Alphabetical order always helps. First page. 1965. Hand written. Blue Bic pen. I knew that was wrong. I checked … first published 1962. This was a later impression. I’d suspected that. The film poster reproduced as a frontispiece confirmed it. 3/6d. Top right corner. 3/6d was a lot of money. I remembered. The store detective had stopped me in the bookshop doorway. He had instructed me to go back and pay the fat woman at the counter.
‘I’ll go back and pay the fat woman at the counter,’ I said.
(With apologies to Len Deighton)
US poster, August 1965
It was the anti-James Bond. Saltzman had produced the early Bond films and decided to go for a more realistic secret agent, a working class ex-army sergeant from Len Deighton’s 1962 novel. Daltzman brought over Ken Adam (production design), Peter Hunt (editor) and John Barry (composer) from the James Bond films. Sidney Furie (best known for The Young Ones with Cliff Richard) was brought in to direct, though fell out badly with Saltzman who later claimed he fired him and Peter Hunt had directed some of it. Hunt denied that. Saltzman kept the BAFTA Award for Best Film of 1965 though.
It is highly regarded, appearing in most lists of Greatest British Films of All Time. But not in any compiled by me.
Wiki has this to say on Furie:
The film showcased Furie’s unique visual style, utilizing multiple cameras, long-take master shots, and dynamic camera movement in lieu of fast cutting. Furie worked closely with cinematographer Otto Heller to shoot through and around foreground objects, creating a “refracted” view of the action and an all-encompassing sense of paranoia.
To save typing I’ll repeat a section from my review of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which I did manage to get through:
I’ve got a mild genre problem here. Don’t worry it’s not infectious. I can’t stand the spy stories of Len Deighton, who with enormous difficulty, I could half-follow, and dislike John le Carré considerably more. It’s incomprehensible guff to me. I never got far enough into Smiley’s People on TV to get absorbed. A columnist recently admitted the same, bought the DVD to try and couldn’t understand it at all. Then he realized he’d started with DVD2 instead of DVD 1. Reversing it didn’t help. Basically, the clues as to the identity of the evil double mole at the heart of everything are not set in the story. You know that every character is at least a double-crosser, with triple, quadruple and quintuple-crossing thrown in for good measure. None of them are likeable, so you don’t really care which one turns out to be baddie-in-chief. They’re all candidates.
I was hoping viewing The Ipcress File might shift that perception, particularly as Michael Caine is coming out so well in these retrospectives. I saw the three 60s ones at the time, The Ipcress File plus Funeral in Berlin and Horse Under Water and I have all three novels. I’m persistent with novels and it can take me three before I finally admit that I don’t like an author. Once I’ve started, I don’t give up … which may be why there are five or six in my bedside table with bookmarks in at around fifty pages. Karen will read twenty pages of a novel and bin it if it isn’t working. I can’t. This may come from me being a student of American Literature who was so assiduous that I read all five of the Mohicans series by Fenimore-Cooper (four more than I had to), most of Hawthorne, most of Melville.
So did The Ipcress File work this time? It didn’t. I could sit and admire the filming more than the plot. Then the cinematography was what the tech crew on shoots used to describe dismissively as “film school.” You are aware of the camera, and the angles and the unusual use of depth of field all the time. As conventional directors often say, ‘If you’re aware of the camera, it’s gone wrong.’
Film school.
Michael Caine is very good, engaging as ever. He does being tortured brilliantly. The character is a good cook (as was Len Deighton) and as a nod, Harry Palmer has Deighton’s newspaper column recipes on the walls. In the cooking scene close ups, the hands are Len Deighton’s. So he was an unusual spy.
Len Deighton’s fingers. I saw my first green capsicum a year later in 1966 and what’s that green stuff? Herbs!
Michael Caine spoke about the initial reaction of Hollywood executives:
When the executives saw the rushes of The Ipcress File … they sent a messsage to the director, Sidney Furie, that read, ‘Michael Caine is wearing glasses, shopping in supermarkets and cooking. He comes across as a homosexual.’ That wasn’t the exact message … I’ve cleaned it up a bit. Luckily Sid took no notice. In fact he used the difficulty. When the girl (played by Sue Lloyd) asks if I always wear glasses, I say in Harry Palmer’s rather low-key, anti-hero way, ‘I only take them off in bed.’ She reaches over and takes them off. It’s now considered to be one of the greatest moments of movie seduction.
Michael Caine, Blowing The Bloody Doors Off, 2018
The shot! Now considered to be one of the greatest moments of movie seduction?
Is it? When we reached that point, I said to Karen:
This bit is now considered to be one of the greatest moments of movie seduction.
Which bit?
That bit where she takes off his glasses.
Rewind …
There … this bit.
Do you think it is?
No.
I wouldn’t even have noticed.
According to Hollywood, only gay men visited supermarkets in 1965. Fascinating study of the era. A small range of goods, but piled very high. Worth an essay.
The glasses were Caine’s choice. He realized that Salzman might work through Len Deighton’s other Harry Palmer novels in James Bond franchise style (and he did), and feared typecasting. He decided if he wore glasses for this character, he could remove them for others. He started with three pairs, and once they had all been broken, they bought twenty more pairs.
THE PLOT
This is the point where I do a synopsis of the plot studded with photos. The trouble with this genre is that synopses are invariably plot spoilers because those who love the genre love the eventual revelation of the plot. The other thing is the film is colour and the best stills online are black & white lobby cards. In those days a separate stills photographer had them pose for lobby cards. How fast can I do this?
Yes, a coffee press and coffee bean grinder. In 1965. A foretaste of the future.
Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) was a sergeant in the army with a whiff of criminality. In the most exciting part of the film, the credits, he is using a cafetiere (coffee press) which no one had seen in 1965. Stunning and Caine went on to advertise them. It’s downhill from there.
A scientist gets kidnapped and his guard killed. The sixteenth one to quit or disappear. Harry Palmer is brought in to see Colonel Ross. He is assigned to Major Dalby (Nigel Green) and given a pay increase from £1300 a year to £1400. Dalby says Grantby and his assistant Housemartin are the suspects (of what?). Palmer works with Jock Carswell (Gordon Jackson). Would you have guessed Jock was Scottish?
Jock Carswell (Gordon Jackson) and (Harry Palmer) Michael Caine
Housemartin gets killed by people pretending to be Palmer and Carswell. They find a tape with IPCRESS but it produces noise which is either meaningless (or possibly a copy of a Stockhausen LP or The Doors doing The End.)
There’s some sort of multi storey car park confrontation and shooting. You may have seen one of these before or since.
Who’s shooting who and why? The Mercedes registration (B) points to a 1964 model
There’s a deal to get the scientist back but Palmer has shot a man who turns out to be a CIA agent so the CIA are after him too. The scientist has been brainwashed. Carswell finds a book Induction of Psychoneuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress” – IPCRESS. Carswell (Gordon Jackson) gets shot dead in Palmer’s car but achieves immortality as the butler in Upstairs Downstairs. His death was a surprise because these sort of movies usually have a buddy team.
Palmer discovers the dead agent.
Chez Palmer, we find another dead CIA agent. Back at the office the IPCRESS file is missing (the file about brainwashing, not the Len Deighton novel).
Dalby tells Palmer to get out of town. On the train to somewhere he gets kidnapped by someone. When he wakes up he is in a prison cell in Albania. Now if Palmer was any kind of agent he would have known that this would have been a luxury flat in 1965 Albania.
Welcome to The Hilton, Tirana, Mr Palmer. This will be your room.
He is tortured with flashing lights and distorted sounds. So what? I’ve been to a Hawkwind concert too and I survived. This is “IPCRESS” in operation.
Hmm. If the Hawkwind doesn’t work, try the Grateful Dead.
He manages to keep sane by inflicting pain on himself with the rusty nail he uses to scratch daily lines on the cell wall, assuming that whenever food comes, a day has passed. Grantby installs a post-hypnotic trigger phrase so Palmer can be controlled in the future.
Palmer escapes and finds out he was actually in a ship’s container in London all the time. Doh! He is confronted by Colonel Ross and Major Dalby who he has arranged to meet. Dalby uses the trigger phrase and says ‘Shoot the traitor’ but as he is about to shoot Ross he bangs his hand which reminds him of the pain from that rusty nail and the trigger phrase so shoots Dalby.
Somewhere in all that he took off his glasses and bedded a girl. I can’t place when or where. Karen said, ‘Am I right? There was only just one female in it?’ I think she was.
Dalby & Palmer: Palmer failed to apply the preposterous moustache test
The preposterous moustache test should have made anyone aware that Dalby was the villain.
OVERALL
The original novel is all first person. The Ipcress File led to Alfie and stardom for Michael Caine. The big miss was that they should have had his first person narration in Alfie style, just like the book.
It didn’t work for us. Karen said if I hadn’t been doing the review she’d have switched it off after half an hour. Probably right. One of the least successful retrospective viewings of the series for me, but I should have known my antipathy for the genre (except for 24) would rule. If you like this kind of thing, it is a classic of the genre.
THE DVD
Two DVDS with an entire disc of extras.
SOUNDTRACK
You know without looking that a 60s British film is likely to be either John Barry or John Dankworth. In this John Barry featured cimbalom heavily in a loud and dramatic soundtrack.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, famed for Dr Who, did the electronic music for the brainwashing sequence.
MICHAEL CAINE
The Ipcress File (1965)
Alfie (1966)
The Magus (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
It’s rare that I disagree with you Peter, but on this issue we’re at odds. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a masterpiece! John Le Carré is one of the few novelists I always buy in hard back on day one. Hilary Mantel’s another but that’s only since Wolf Hall.
But with regard to the Harry Palmer novels and films, the point is they were a foil to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. Their significance is their ethos of insubordination. Bond stood for everything imperial and British. Lots of stiffness in that upper lip. Harry Palmer (cleverly never named in the books) had a fair curl to the lips. The films were variable. I liked Ipcress but Berlin was a great film of its kind and time. They didn’t film Horse Under Water because Billion Dollar Brain was a bit of a flop. The expensive brain no doubt had less power than my iPhone but the title sounded good.
But I did like your pastiche of Len Deighton.
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Another friend e-mailed me to say my comparing Len Deighton to John Le Carre was like comparing The Dave Clark Five with The Band. I now realize I didn’t see Horse Under Water, as it was never filmed, but was thinking of Billion Dollar Brain. I was looking at the books.
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