The Ipcress File (1965) - film review

When a renowned physicist named Radcliffe mysteriously disappears, security operative Harry Palmer is taken off routine surveillance and assigned to a counterintelligence department headed by Major Dalby.  Radcliffe’s unorthodox play-it-by-ear methods soon bring him into conflict with his superiors.  It doesn’t help that he manages to lose sight of Radcliffe’s abductors immediately after finding them.  A tape marked with the word Ipcress appears to hold the key to the mystery, the first clue that enemy agents are brainwashing top scientists.  But as Palmer discovers, the real enemy is much nearer to home...

By far the best screen adaptation of a Len Deighton novel, The Ipcress File is the film that made Michael Caine an international star, coming on the heels of his first major screen role in Zulu (1964).  Producer Harry Saltzman conceived Caine’s character, the inelegant and seemingly charmless Harry Palmer, as an ironic counterpoint to the flamboyant James Bond, the secret agent who had burst onto the big screen in a series of films in the early 1960s, interestingly co-produced by Saltzman. 

Whereas Sean Connery’s 007 was the athletic, sexy action hero who seldom got things wrong, Caine’s Palmer was the slightly out-of-condition Cockney bloke in the street, sporting NHS specs and the kind of apparel which even Marks and Spencer would be ashamed to sell, and not all that good at his job.  It is the role which established Caine as the sympathetic heavy (whose main asset was his sardonic sense of humour) in what would be a long and highly successful acting career.  The actor reprised the role of Harry Palmer in two immediate sequels, Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), and then thirty years on in Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1996).

Presumably in an over-zealous attempt to make his mark, rookie Canadian filmmaker Sidney J. Furie directs The Ipcress File as if he were making an experimental art house film rather than a conventional mainstream thriller.  Although his use of the camera is at times excessively arty (suggesting that the director and cinematographer had spent far too much time watching old German expressionist films), Furie does create a very distinctive look for the film, giving it an unsettling dreamlike quality which emphasises the darkly duplicitous and labyrinthine aspects of the plot. 

It can be argued that it is Sidney Furie’s inventiveness and reluctance to play things by the book which makes the film so memorable.  The audience is too busy being distracted by odd camera angles and point-of-view shots (the POV often being that of a fly on the ceiling or a very small dwarf) to notice the sillier aspects of the plot. It is the sheer weirdness of The Ipcress File that makes it a classic of British cinema, although it of course helps that Michael Caine is around to break the mould as to what constitutes an action hero, totally redefining the word "style" as he does so.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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