THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PROJECT PHASE ONE: The Ipcress File (1965)

As I mentioned what seems like ages ago, I’ve only seen the third Harry Palmer film, Billion Dollar Brain (there are three theatrical films, two made-for-TV movies, and one film, Blue Ice--which features series star Michael Caine as a former spy named Harry, that is unofficially considered part of the canon).  When I was doing the Better In The Dark podcast, my friend and co-host Derrick Ferguson and I looked very hard for the others in the series to no avail.  This is the first time I’m seeing this first Harry Palmer entry, and I’m glad to report it holds up.

The story goes that this was Harry Saltzman’s ‘anti-Bond’ series, and boy does it show.  Right up front, this movie is about how plodding and unglamorous the spy life is; in the world of Harry Palmer, this is just a job, complete with desks and paper work and dull days spent in an attic doing surveillance.  Hell, unlike the super-slick and stylish Maurice Binder title sequences of the Bond films, we get the movie’s credits over footage of Palmer literally making his morning coffee!  This is spy movie as police procedural, not as power fantasy/travelogue.  And it’s to the credit of the script and especially the direction of Sidney J. Furie that it remains engaging throughout its almost two-hour running time.

Oh, about Furie--this guy directs the Hell out of this movie.  My prior exposure to Furie’s work was not kind; this is the fellow who directed Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, after all.  But if the story isn’t heightened or stylized, the feel of the film is.  As I got deeper into the plot, the more convinced I was that Furie was being influenced by film noir conventions.  Even mundane scenes are drenched in deep black shadow, and every shot is just slightly off-kilter .  Furie delights in shooting his actors through objects--the closest thing we get to an action sequence is purposely shot through the windows of a telephone booth--to keep us from losing sight of the fact that this is work.  Even the romantic subplot, if you can call it that, between Caine and Sue Lloyd is done in this chilly, matter-of-fact way with dutch angles and long swaths of blackness that somehow is approriate given the world we’re presented in this film.

I will admit that the plot probably isn’t the clearest thing in the world, and a big twist in the last act was telegraphed far too early for it to work as a shock.  But it’s an interesting film that pulls the trick of being more grounded than what passed for spy cinema in its age and seeming somehow all that stranger than the fantasy world we’re presented by the Bonds and Flints and Helms of the era.

It’s funny; when I first saw Billion Dollar Brain, I thought Ken Russell was a bizarre choice for a more realistic spy series.  Now that I’ve seen The Ipcress File, I realize he was exactly the type of director this series embraced.

Needless to say, I’m happy the Poll chose this, and I highly recommend this film--especially for spy culture nuts like me.

Now onto 1966....