Cast:
Michael Caine (Harry Palmer), Guy Doleman (Colonel Ross), Nigel Green (Major Dalby), Sue Lloyd (Jean Courtney), Gordon Jackson (Jock Carswell), Aubrey Richards (Dr. Radcliffe), Frank Gatliff (Eric Grantby), Thomas Baptiste (Barney), Oliver MacGreevy (Housemartin), Freda Bamford (Alice), and Pauline Winter (Charlady) Directed by Sidney J. Furie (#787 - Superman IV: The Quest for Peace)
Review:
"If you have a great story and you try to do all these different camera angles, you'll get away with it. But if you don't have a great story, they'll hit you hard. If you try to use the screen the way a painter uses a canvas, somehow it's not considered acceptable. The reason I did it for the first time on THE IPCRESS FILE was because we had a script and we hated it. What we did was we shot from the beginning and we rewrote as we went."
When it comes to spy features, it makes sense to eventually encounter this film. It is an adaptation roughly based on The IPCRESS File, a 1962 novel written by Len Deighton, who had been inspired by a neighbor he once had named Anna Wolkoff, a daughter of a czarist admiral and also a spy that ended up being arrested, which Deighton (a young boy living in central London when World War II started) witnessed. Interestingly enough, the ensuing film would be produced by Harry Saltzman, who had went from producing stuff such as Look Back in Anger (1958) to being a partner in producing the first couple of James Bond films (incidentally, Deighton was initially hired to write From Russia with Love [1963] and had even travelled with the crew but was eventually replaced). The director was the Canadian Sidney J. Furie, who had started his career in his native Canada in 1957 (turning a planned CBC project into his debut feature with A Dangerous Age) before moving to England and gradually rising up the ranks of small-scale stuff in horror, drama and musicals (most notably with Cliff Richard). Apparently, Harry Saltzman did not like Furie in production and even once claimed editor Peter R. Hunt (also a Bond alumni) was mostly involved in direction (he wasn't big on certain angles utilized in certain shots, but Hunt backed Furie). The film screenplay was credited to Bill Canaway to James Doran, although apparently Lionel Davidson, Johanna Harwood, Lukas Heller and Ken Hughes delivered uncredited work; according to Caine, Furie took a copy of the script on the first day he was on set and set it on fire, which meant that the film was basically being re-written as they shot it. Deighton wrote five further novels involving Harry Palmer (he wasn't named in the books, but, well, go with it) until 1974; two of those books were turned into films (Funeral in Berlin [1966] was directed by Guy Hamilton while Billion Dollar Brain [1967] was directed by Ken Russell) to go with two "TV films" that all had Caine as the lead. In 2022, The Ipcress File was adapted again as a six-episode TV miniseries.
There are a handful of people familiar with the James Bond films here, such as production designer Ken Adam, editor Peter R. Hunt and composer John Barry, but it doesn't mean one is watching a pastiche. Instead, one has a neat and compact feature that has a wonderfully dry Caine. The results matter most in a grounded and cynical feature that clearly reflects well upon its era with a craftsman and a worthy cast and crew to make entertainment in the art of the mundane for elite paranoia. There is a smoothness to the production that you can feel through its 109-minute runtime that has style even in the mask of realism. Even for his second big role in a film, one just sees Caine and understands just how he could be a star just like that, because his habits are ones that we quickly grow to know and love that goes from disregard for authority to appreciating the fine art of cooking. His wit is drier than say, a certain quippy film icon of the time, but it oozes a certain type of charm within the perception that just never fails. Doleman and Green provide worthwhile contrast to Caine in the general stiff-lipped sense of bureaucracy and stone-wall nature that is more unnerving than it seems (of course Doleman would end up being the only recurring actor besides Caine in the trilogy of feature films). Lloyd is soothing in that elusive tête-à-tête between her and Caine. When you think about it, it really isn't so much about the plot (although Gatliff is pretty unnerving when it comes to the brainwashing stuff) as it is about the vibes that arise from a camera that has you view the action as if you were the one staking out the characters. The atmosphere (complete with seemingly underrated John Barry doing the music) is one that is hard to match in carefully composed fun. The patience taken to watch it play all the way through leads to plenty of reward for the viewer that seeks it out.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
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