Coburn’s Derek Flint, Dean Martin’s Matt
Helm and Monica Vitti’s Modesty Blaise.
On television, there wasDanger Man,The
Man From U.N.C.L.E.,Mission: Impossible
andThe Avengers. Everyone wanted in on the
spy game — even Fred Flintstone inA Man
Called Flintstone.
Ian Fleming was the market leader, but
there was a growing audience for John le Carré’s
thoughtful, cynical novels. Le Carré’s spymaster,
George Smiley, came to the screen inThe Spy
Who Came In From The Cold(1965), which was
literally in black-and-white but offered more
shades of grey than Bond’s pop art-coloured
comic strips. Between Bond and Smiley was the
nameless narrator of Len Deighton’s Raymond
Chandleresque spy thrillers, who became the
deliberately generic ‘Harry Palmer’ when they
were filmed. Producer Harry Salzman, who
partnered with Albert R. Broccoli on the Bond
movies, madeThe Ipcress Filealmost to hedge
his bets — hoping for a virtual monopoly on
movie espionage. Harry Palmer is to James
Bond what Spider-Man is to Superman — a
down-to-earth, realistic, vulnerable and troubled
version of a cartoon heroic ideal (whose exploits
take place somewhere more closely resembling
the real world than Metropolis)...but, sneakily,The Ipcress
File
Michael Caine as
Harry Palmer,
a more tweedy
type of spy.just as much a wish fulfilment fantasy for
powerless audiences.
The Ipcress Fileopens just likeDr. No,
with the pre-credits death of the agent the
hero has to replace. Only, instead of being
assassinated by blind beggars in tropical
Jamaica, Palmer’s predecessor is dumped with
the mailbags on the drab platform of Marylebone
station. We meet Bond in a tuxedo at a baccarat
table, but Palmer rolls out of bed in a London
flat. There’s still a touch of the aspirational
colour-supplement lifestyle guru about Harry
as he somewhat prissily prepares his coffee
(Deighton made his hero a working-class
gourmet, and the film did its bit to popularise
such then-rare luxuries as the cafetière and
home-grinder). Reporting to the seedy garret
(“Remember you’re still in the army, boyo”),
he’s pulled off dreary surveillance duty by his
supercilous commander, Ross (Guy Doleman),
and reassigned to the not-yet-cleared desk of
the dead man, in a department run by another
upper-class hawk, Dalby (Nigel Green). His
brief is to investigate “the brain drain”, the
disappearances of high-ranking scientists
who have been showing up again with a mental
block about continuing their work. There’s a
Fleming-style diabolical mastermind in the mix,THE
MASTERPIECE
We reassess the greatest
films of all time, one
film at a timeIT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO overestimate how huge
spies were in the mid-1960s. IfEmpirehad been
published back then, spies would have been on
the cover two out of every three issues (The
Beatles would have nabbed the third). Of course,
the craze started with James Bond, who made his
big-screen debut inDr. No(1962), and inspired
other high-living secret agents, like James Alamy, ShutterstockREVIEW