Year Released: 1965 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁🥁
Directed by: Sidney J. Furie
Starring: Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd, Gordon Jackson
(Not Rated, 109 min.)

"I was counting on you being an insubordinate bastard, Palmer." Len Deighton: The Ipcress File

This classic British thriller has the nitty gritty stuff of Cold War spy stories – tedious stakeouts, dark hallways, rain-polished streets, and a bureaucracy almost as deadly as the enemy. Meet Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer, the anti-James Bond, who even with his cockney accent and horn-rimmed glasses is every bit as sexy as his better-known rival. And did I mention that he can cook, too?

And he’s so very British, too. Harry Palmer even refers to the good-looking females as “birds,” something you’d never hear Oxford educated Bond say. In fact, this “working-class hero with a taste for Mozart and Haute cuisine” is a purposeful contrast to the continental sophisticate 007. Harry Palmer, a cockney career soldier who has earned his way out of the brig – he’s there on black-marketing charges – and into the intelligence services, is on the same short lease as Neal Caffrey of the new TV series “White Collar.” He’s got to obey orders, even if it goes against his nature, or he’s back behind bars.

His new boss, Major Dalby (Nigel Green) sets the tone by reading Palmer’s dossier, his B-107 if you’re into the British bureaucratic jargon, aloud to him.

“Insubordinate. Insolent. A trickster. Perhaps with criminal tendencies.”

“Yes, that a pretty fair appraisal, sir,” Palmer replies without missing a beat, subtly demonstrating all three characteristics at once.

And he’ll need all this and more to help solve Operation Brain Drain, as it’s been dubbed, the systematic removal of some of Britain’s best scientists.

The gentle satire of The Ipcress File reveals the pedestrian and often clumsy machinations of a spy world stripped clean of its glamorous intrigue. Yes, the bad guys do have peppy code names like Blue Jay and House Martin, but even these are a kind of sly joke. In practice, Harry hunts them down through a series of parking violations, and he doesn’t shadow them in cloak and dagger fashion or hound them through the streets of London in the obligatory screeching car chase. Instead, Harry walks down the spiral wooden stairs of the Science Library and seats himself across the table from Blue Jay and proposes a deal for the latest scientist, Radcliffe.

All Harry ends up with is a defunct telephone number. And later on, when he really thinks he has the goods on Blue Jay, calling in a very expensive raid on the warehouse where he thinks Radcliffe is being held, one with streams of police cars and gun wielding officers, he comes up empty handed. That is, except for a badly damaged audiotape he finds smoldering in some ashes. It has some letters on it –IPCRESS – and Harry says, perhaps to save face, “This could be something.” Understatement and irony at its British best!

Other encounters have subtle and low key underpinnings that are not without a touch of dry British humor. Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman), his earlier boss, wants a word with Harry. He doesn’t choose a deserted park bench or the pale light of a streetlight, but a supermarket, where he loads his cart with everything from Beef-A-Roni (“Extraordinary!”) to baby food as he tries to pry some information from his former minion. And just to make sure Harry gets the menace behind his request, he heads off his shopping cart at the end of the row, a comic trivialization of a standard cop maneuver usually done with a V-8 instead of a wire box on wheels.

On the other hand, Harry’s bedroom talk is music to any woman’s ears. “I’m going to cook you the best meal you have ever tasted.” Quite an aphrodisiac, we might conclude, as his beautiful colleague Jean Courtney (Sue Lloyd) asks later if he always wears his glasses. He has not sooner explained yes, except when he goes to bed, that she gently removes them. This subtle sex scene, with everything left to our imagination, beats or at least rivals Bond’s sly double ententes or the shot of a gown as it tumbles to the bedroom floor.

And let’s talk about those horn-rimmed glasses, shall we. Did you know that Harry Potter was the first action hero to wear glasses? Part of the reason was actor Michael Caine’s desire to camouflage his face, even though in real life he was myopic. He didn’t want to be over-identified with the Harry Palmer character and could therefore remove them for other roles. The trademark glasses caught another Michael’s eye, though, Mike Myers, who modeled his Austin Powers after Harry Palmer.

Still more light humor comes from Harry’s very British bosses and the very British bureaucracy. The door to his new office is manned not by an adoring Miss Moneypenny, but a gray-haired matron who never sports a smile, but just a drooping cigarette that threatens to drop ashes on all that paperwork on her desk. And paper there is, paperwork galore. Harry and his colleagues must regularly fill out the onerous 18 questions on the L 102 forms, whether or not they actually accomplish anything or not.

Colonel Ross and Major Dalby wear their bowler hats and carry the obligatory umbrellas as walking sticks, meeting over tea and Dover sole at their club. Dalby relishes his meeting with Blue Jay at the military Band podium, keeping the beat with his leather-gloved hand. Palmer, a Mozart lover, is “in luck with the next piece,” but its transition from orchestra to bandstand lacks something for the fastidious spy, who wants to leave.

“I think they’re playing very well,” Dalby protests.

“Tell me who wins,” is Palmer’s parting shot

You can’t go wrong with this classic that has aged as nicely as its so talented star. Forget the well choreographed, adrenaline pumping, technically perfect, mindless action pieces we’ve grown used to, and settle in for the slow burn instead of the superficial sizzle.

Kathy Borich

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Trailer:

Film-L0ving Foodie

It’s no surprise that Harry Palmer is an East End gourmet, or at least a British version of one. The spymaster who penned the novel, Len Deighton, was an accomplished cook, a pastry chef by training, and he penned illustrated recipes geared to Britain’s male audience called, for lack of a better term, cookstrips. If you look closely, you can see them framed in Harry Palmer’s kitchen. These were compiled in the 1060s and called Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook, with a picture of a very handsome guy cooking some pasta while an entranced beauty encourages him. In celebration of Deighton’s 80th birthday, the cookbook was reissued this year.

One of Harry’s featured dishes, the one that his beautiful fellow spy Jean fell for, was made with Champignon Sauce, a mushroom cream sauce. It is delicious with pasta, chicken, or steak.

You can enjoy it even without any clandestine activities in your portfolio.

Champignon Sauce

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms

¼ cup dry white wine

¼ cup butter or margarine

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup chicken broth

1 cup milk

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon sugar

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons whipping cream

PREPARATION:

1. In small saucepan over medium heat, cook and stir mushrooms in wine until liquid evaporates; reserve.

2. In 1-quart saucepan, melt butter; stir in flour. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, 1 to 2 minutes or until mixture is bubbly. Stir broth and milk into flour mixture. Cook, stirring frequently, about 5 minutes or until sauce has thickened. Stir in salt, sugar and pepper.

3. In small bowl, beat egg yolks and cream with whisk or fork. Stir about 1/2 cup of hot sauce into egg yolk mixture. Blend egg yolk mixture slowly into hot sauce in saucepan; stir in mushrooms. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until hot but not boiling.

Goes well with pasta, Chicken, or steak.

TCL Cooking

*New Series Update 🥁🥁🥁1/2

Don’t fall for this lame series that tries to parachute in on the wonderful 1965 original starring the inimitable Michael Caine. As one critic aptly noted, why attempt a remake when there are so many great spy stories out there waiting to be put to film?

And such a hodgepodge. A menage a trois of The Manchurian Candidate, the John F. Kennedy assassination, with just a nod – mostly in the fashion and style – to the original.

And where is the sly humor? They redo a meeting at a bandstand but forget Michael Caine’s disdain for the music – Harry Palmer is, one should recall, a lover of Mozart, at least in the original, and he cannot stand his beloved composer reduced to a bandstand rendition. The new series is a pale imitation, omitting Palmer’s parting.

“Tell me who wins.”

Same for his culinary efforts, just a scene of whisked eggs and not much more. The ersatz Palmer (Joe Cole) has the prerequisite dark glasses, but they disguise a rather ugly mug, not the handsome visage Michael Caine hides behind his.

The series’ Palmer is all class resentment with none of Caine’s fun with it. And as beautiful as his female costar is, Lucy Boyton, loses the panache she showed us in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Here she is all looks and not much else. Yes, she does look almost Audrey Hepburn gorgeous in her 60s attire, bringing back memories of my high school days, but that is not enough. (I’ll bet Hugh Laurie who wrote, directed, and played in the Agatha Christie series Why Didn’t they Ask Evans would have done a much better job directing, but perhaps he wisely would reject the tedious screenplay.)

Ironically, it is Tom Hollander from 2016’s The Night Manager, also starring High Laurie, who shines here, perhaps the only member of the series cast who is not wooden. In The 2016 film Tom Hollander is “Corky,” the sinister fixer Lance Corcoran, someone we love to hate, a flaming and resentful gay who explodes in drunken rages. In The Ipcress File series, he is the sedate Colonel Dalby, never outwardly flustered, yet able to show his inner turmoil in subtle body language and facial expressions, the epitome of the British stiff upper lip.

And finally, The Brits seem to have forgotten The Special Relationship with those of us across the pond. Maybe the America bashing is one reason so many of the current socialist–loving Brits loved it.

***

I will close with the comments of a few regular people from the UK not buying it either.

“What's the point of this remake of The Ipcress File? The original movie was as good as it gets, plus Joe Cole looks like he's playing Michael Caine in a school play.”

“If it had been parody, it would have failed. As a homage to bad 60s plots, it succeeds in the worst possible way.'”

“Having watched all six episodes of ITV's The Ipcress File, I can promise you don't need to. That's six hours of my life gone forever watching a pile of wooden acting.”