The Cold War meant that spy films were highly popular in the 1960s, especially after James Bond made his screen debut in "Dr No". (Two further Bond films had appeared by the time "The Ipcress File" was released). Although "The Ipcress File" was also produced by Harry Saltzman, it deliberately presents a quite different picture of life in the British Secret Service. Bond is a glamorous figure who lives a life of luxury, travels to exotic locations, drives expensive cars and seduces a succession of beautiful young women.
The central character of this film is Harry Palmer, a former sergeant in the army who only joined the Secret Service because the alternative was serving time in a military prison for fraud and corruption. He lives in a flat in a Victorian terrace house in what today would be an extremely desirable location but which in the sixties was still seedy and downmarket. He does not get to travel the world- the entire film is set in London. He drives a Ford Zephyr rather than an Aston Martin and his love interest, Jean Courtney, is far from being a Bond girl. (Joan Collins was considered for the role, but was presumably rejected for being too glamorous). Like Bond, Palmer is a lover of good food, but does all his own cooking and has to shop in a supermarket. We learn that his annual salary is £1,400- a decent working wage in 1965, but hardly sufficient to finance a lifestyle like Bond's.
The biggest difference between the two, however, can be summed up by saying that Palmer is a spy whereas Bond is an agent. The word "agent" is derived from the Latin "agere", meaning to do, from which we also derive the word "actor". The word "spy" comes ultimately from the root, meaning to watch, that gives us the word "spectator". Bond is an actor in a drama, Palmer a spectator. I was interested by the reviewer who pointed out that sight is important in this film. Unusually for the hero of a thriller, he wears spectacles (another word from the same root as "spy"), and there are frequent references to implements such as cameras and binoculars. The images during the brainwashing sequence reflect the sixties fascination with all things psychedelic.
Unlike Bond's, Harry's work is dull and bureaucratic, spent in watching suspects from draughty attics and then completing "field reports" and other routine paperwork. Much of the time he speaks in the sort of acronyms beloved of the British civil service but unintelligible to outsiders. Whereas "M" speaks to Bond as a social equal (they are probably members of the same London club), Harry is patronised by his upper-class superiors, Colonel Ross and Major Dalby, who see him as unreliable and insubordinate, an NCO with unwarranted ambitions to join the officer class.
This was Michael Caine's second starring role; the first was "Zulu", made the previous year. In that film he had played an upper-class army officer, but Palmer was the first of a number of working class heroes he was to play over the next few years. (Other examples include Alfie, Jack Carter and Charlie Croker from "The Italian Job"). The politics of social class are, in fact, much in evidence in this film. This is perhaps not surprising given that the sixties were the heyday of the "kitchen sink" school of British film-making, which sought to give greater prominence to the lives of working-class people, but the theme of class distinctions took on added significance in a spy thriller. In 1950 Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, both members of the "Cambridge ring" of Soviet spies had defected to avoid exposure, and in 1963 a third member of the ring, Kim Philby, had also defected. (Since 1965 it has come to light that there were two further members, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross). Burgess, MacLean and Philby were all from privileged, Establishment backgrounds, so their treachery caused some consternation in Britain. Unlike some countries, such as France and Italy, Communism had very little mass appeal in Britain (by the sixties the party could never attract more than a derisory vote in elections), but it remained the opium of a certain type of bourgeois intellectual who perhaps imagined that after the Revolution the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would in practice be a dictatorship of themselves.
The plot concerns MI5's attempts to investigate the kidnapping of a number of British government scientists and the involvement of a shady Albanian-born businessman with links to the KGB. As is common in spy thrillers, there is an atmosphere of betrayal and mistrust. Harry is never sure whom he can trust, even among his colleagues. It becomes clear that either Ross or Dalby is working for the Russians, but Harry cannot be certain which. (Was the name Dalby, I wonder, chosen because of its closeness to "Philby"?) There is a certain amount of dry humour, particularly in-jokes. (One line is "You've forgotten your camera, Dr Radcliffe". This is a reference to the Radcliffe Camera, which is not a device for taking photographs, but a well-known university building in Oxford). As a spy thriller it still works well, and generates considerable tension, particularly towards the end, but it is also watchable today because of the insights it provides into the political and social concerns of its era. 7/10.
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