The Ipcress File

Harry Palmer is an army man being worked in intelligence as a punishment. His job is to find missing scientists. It leads to an abduction and from there to a brainwashing programme. Meanwhile Palmer fills in forms, clocks in and queries his pay. The subject is not the thrill of espionage but espionage as a civil service post. Palmer wears glasses, cooks his own food and is permanently at odds with his superiors, a deliberate inversion of the image Bond was building in the same years. The form is full of odd angles: shots taken from behind a lamp, inside a phone box, at floor level. Sidney J. Furie was criticised for it at the time and it is now the film's best known feature. The source is Len Deighton's novel, in which the protagonist has no name; the name was invented for the film. The producer Harry Saltzman was making the Bond films in the same period, so two opposing images of the spy came out of one office. John Barry's score is built on the cimbalom, a Hungarian string instrument, and defines the film's sound on its own. Michael Caine plays Palmer and Nigel Green his superior. Who it is for: viewers who like Cold War espionage and unglamorous protagonists. Who it is not for: anyone wanting action; this is almost entirely surveillance, talk and paperwork.