Original subtitles

(TENSE MUSIC)

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

One of the greatest spy movies ever made,

The Ipcress File begins with a kidnap,

a killing and a cup of coffee.

What has happened to you, Palmer?

One of you knows exactly what has happened to me.

One of you is a double agent.

You are right, Palmer.

Who wanted you to microfilm The Ipcress file?

I did that to test you.

What do you think it is about The Ipcress File

that remains so iconic?

The Ipcress File, as a piece of work,

has inspired and influenced so much.

But it remains untouched, I think, and it remains untouched

because it's a particular moment,

it is nailing a moment in history.

The story of The Ipcress File is as interesting as the Ipcress file.

(SHRILL ALARM RINGING)

(RINGING CONTINUES)

(RINGING CONTINUES)

(SLOW, JAZZY OPENING THEME MUSIC FROM "THE IPCRESS FILE" PLAYS)

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

(BLENDER WHIRRING)

With the opening titles to John Barry's distinctive score,

we're introduced to the hero, Harry Palmer,

a career-defining role for Michael Caine.

Awakening in his London apartment,

putting on his signature glasses,

Palmer meticulously sets about grinding his coffee beans.

It's a wonderful human touch, the soul of the man -

a cup of coffee should not be hurried.

The message is loud and clear.

This film will be nothing like 007,

which is exactly what producer Harry Saltzman intended.

When The Ipcress File came out, it was a huge success,

largely because it showed another side of the espionage game.

It was really sort of down and dirty and gritty,

gave a very interesting insight into the... that murky world.

But also because of its hero,

who is not named in the books, in fact,

who was from the working class.

So the film opens with Harry Palmer kind of waking up,

and very sleepily going into his kitchen and putting on his glasses,

cos he is clearly short-sighted, and grinding his own coffee.

And it is this sort of almost ritualistic morning for him,

you know, he sits down and reads his newspaper.

And it's both ordinary in what it's depicting,

but also slightly unusual,

in that it is showing this hero who is a little bit unprepossessing,

who seems to be a little bit occupied

by things like going out of the way to make himself...

you know, grind his own coffee, and later on,

to make his own somewhat elaborate meals.

(JAZZY MUSIC CONTINUES)

(MUSIC FADES GRADUALLY)

We're living, I think, in an age of violence.

I think James Bond... epitomises the age of violence.

He is, you know, today's Tarzan, today's Superman.

We live in, I think, a very amoral age.

And Bond... is a product of that age.

Saltzman was always looking for something else to do

on top of the James Bond films.

And The Ipcress File struck him

as being the perfect antidote in a funny sort of way.

He could see it in his head, working as a kind of...

not a rival to the Bond films,

but the sort of other side of the coin.

Of course, his instinct was completely right.

Through Palmer's steely cunning,

Saltzman wanted to say something more evocative about the time.

There would be none of the bases in the belly of a volcano,

the gadgets, the Aston Martins or far-flung locations.

This was a downbeat world in high style.

What do you think Harry Saltzman's intentions were

with developing The Ipcress File as an alternative to Bond?

Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli had created the spy film mania

that was sweeping, you know, America and the UK.

And they were smart enough to know

that you can't launch a rival to James Bond who is James Bond,

but they knew there was a hunger for spy films.

So looking around for a project that was spy,

but wasn't Fleming, they alighted on this.

I mean, it's fantastic.

You launch the one brand and you launch the counter-brand

that undermines it, and you own both of them.

So if people don't like Bond, they can go to Palmer,

if people don't like Palmer, they can go to Bond.

Both of them are paying you, in the end, to produce their films.

So I think it was an incredibly smart piece

of long-term, sort of corporate branding.

I don't mean to sound that cynical, it's not that.

He knew people wanted spies,

he knew he couldn't just keep on churning out Bond films.

This was a really good story.

I mean, The Ipcress File is a great story.

It's also very of its time.

(JAZZY OPENING MUSIC RESUMES)

(DOOR CRASHES) PALMER: Morning.

Fuelled by black humour,

The Ipcress File works both as hard-boiled realism,

and a pastiche on the genre.

You could say Palmer sits midway between 007

and the disillusioned agents of John Le Carre's Circus.

A lot of reviewers at the time of The Ipcress File

said that this was the anti-Bond.

Dr No had come out in 1962 and this was 1965,

so it is in the wake of the first Bond.

This is the antithesis of a man

who would very egotistically announce his name was James Bond.

You know, that in and of itself, I think,

says a lot about the identity of these two figures.

This is someone who...

isn't fulfilling some sort of egotistical fantasy,

he is literally doing his job.

And he is actually, you know, at great risk to himself,

and isn't being paid particularly great, based on his surroundings,

so we're looking at somebody who very much exists in the real world.

And he is kind of, you know, possibly, you could argue,

exploited by his superiors.

You should get up in the morning. 20 minutes late you are, you know?

Anything new? It's all in the report.

And it's neat and tidy, unlike some.

You ought to remember you're still in the army, boyo.

I'll tell you what. You remember for me.

Sporting the most iconic glasses in film history,

Palmer stalks a cool and angular London,

not knowing who to trust.

The Ipcress File is infected

with a very contemporary sense of paranoia.

Director Sidney J Furie's scintillating adaptation

is close to film noir,

thrown into a case of the kidnap and brainwashing of scientists

by unknown forces.

Palmer becomes increasingly suspicious.

He is a pawn in a much bigger game.

(FILM PROJECTOR WHIRRING)

MAN: The one in the hat is Bluejay.

The bald one is his chief of staff,

code-named House Martin.

This was taken in Stockholm two years ago.

Here is a more recent film of Bluejay

in Vienna last October.

(SLOW, JAZZY PIANO MUSIC)

(PROJECTOR WHIRRING STOPS)

Published in 1962,

Len Deighton's The Ipcress File became an instant best-seller.

Critics raved over how radically different it was

from Ian Fleming's jet-set James Bond,

where the Cold War was an afterthought.

So impressed were Bond producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman,

that they hired Deighton to write a draft of From Russia With Love.

Even if little of the work done by the author

found its way into the second Bond film,

Saltzman saw the big screen possibilities

of Deighton's acerbic take on the genre.

Let's start with Len Deighton, the man who wrote The Ipcress File.

What do we know about his background?

One of the beautiful things about The Ipcress File

is how much the people involved in it

actually are also the people portrayed in it.

So Len Deighton created Harry Palmer,

and he very much is Harry Palmer, in a sense.

He was working class, grew up in Marylebone.

His dad was a chauffeur, his mum was a cook.

And so he moved around observing society London.

One of his first sort of memorable experiences as a young boy

was watching a woman his mother used to cook for get arrested

during the Second World War for being a German Spy.

NEWLAND: A woman called Anna Wolkoff, who is Russian/British.

It turned out that Anna was a spy

and she was actually arrested by British Intelligence Police,

while he was there, in front of him.

So he became completely fascinated by the world of espionage.

He attended grammar school,

and then he did his national service at the age of 17,

and joined the RAF.

Actually had a rather unusual national service time

because he learnt a lot of things,

and I think they must have discovered

that he had the capacity for embracing

all kinds of different disciplines.

He was taught photography, he took that on very well,

and was actually sent on assignments.

He actually learnt to fly while he was there -

all this is during national service is extraordinary.

So he came out with far more skills than when he went in.

He then applied to Saint Martin's School of Art, got in there,

because he really had a penchant for sketching and drawing.

He then got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art,

and from there, he went into advertising.

So when he sits down to write this spy story,

in many ways, he's filtering his life.

He's filtering the spy experience as a kid,

he's filtering a character who can cook,

who's been in intelligence,

but who has also, as a national serviceman,

come face to face with the deadening bureaucracy,

and crippling class system that was the British military.

So Deighton's approach to the spy novel

was a little bit more down and dirty, I guess you could say.

He writes from the first person in The Ipcress File,

and it's written from the point of view of the protagonist,

and it is very much a report of what had happened.

So what you get in that

is not so much of an authorial distance from the material,

you get a sort of realistic view of the voice of your narrator,

who is sort of a ne'er do well, sort of a man on the street,

a man who is sort of matter of fact

about what he's there to... you know, what he was there to do,

and to the job he was supposed to complete.

And it also has a real kind of hard-boiled quality to it,

maybe partly because by having a first-person narrator,

it does away with the kind of flourishes

that you might otherwise have - it's very straight to the point.

In his novels, the central spy is anonymous.

Well aware of the power of a brand name,

Saltzman pushed for something memorable, but ordinary.

Recalling a dull kid in his class at school,

Caine gave him the name Harry Palmer.

(TENSE MUSIC)

(INDISTINCT CHATTER INDOORS)

(MUSIC CONTINUES)

What makes Palmer so vivid is his anti-authoritarian streak.

There is something of the angry young man

of the British New Wave in him.

And Deighton was heavily influenced by the hard-nosed detective fiction

of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Palmer has the scuffed nobility of a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe.

There are hints of a misspent military service,

and black-market activities in Berlin.

He has landed in the service direct from military prison.

A comparison that is often made with Palmer

is with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the great American detectives.

Did you see that? Absolutely.

There's an essay by Raymond Chandler

describing the perfect detective hero,

which is known as the "down these mean streets a man must go" essay.

And he describes, I would argue, he describes Harry Palmer.

That he is... He is cynical, but he is a romantic.

He goes to places where no-one else will go.

He's poor, otherwise he wouldn't be a detective.

He is of the streets, he's got the common touch,

he can talk to people as they would be spoken to,

but he has absolutely an unswervable faith

and conviction in the truth.

He is after the hidden truth, and he will not stop.

And when you think about what Harry Palmer is,

he is a man who is in this system,

which is venal, corrupt, secretive, sly.

It is full of bureaucracy and broken dreams,

and monotony and pointlessness...

and yet he uses his smarts,

his cunning, his street ways.

He knows guys at Scotland Yard who can help him out at certain points.

He has no respect for authority.

The way that someone like Philip Marlowe

when he first goes to get a job from a posh man

in a house in Beverley Hills, he is just sarcastic

and undermining of his client -

that's how Harry Palmer is with his bosses at the intelligence agency.

Absolutely no respect for authority,

even though he will take the job, he will do the job,

because he believes, in a strange way,

in idealism and truth more than any of the people above him.

Now I can get that new infrared grill.

Well, save your money.

Where you're going, you won't have much time for cooking.

Dalby works his men.

And he doesn't even have my sense of humour.

Yes, sir. I will miss that, sir.

I think as much as The Ipcress File,

with its obsession with surveillance and paranoia,

slightly looks forward to '70s films,

it also looks backward a little bit to this hard-boiled style

of a man trapped in shadowy circumstances,

where he doesn't know who he can trust or who he can turn to.

There was also even a little bit of a wrong man,

or mistaken identity trope in parts of The Ipcress File,

which is a classic hard-boiled thing.

You know, in the case of the American agents

who think that he has intentionally killed a CIA agent

when in fact, it was just an accident.

And so... and things sort of escalate from that point.

So there are all kinds of little things that show

that although he's not playing a detective, and it's not set

in this kind of Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe world,

it does have that sense of a world which is so confusing.

A veteran of Canadian television and a jack of all genres -

musicals, horror, comedy -

Sidney J Furie is a forgotten master.

While he and Saltzman had a tempestuous relationship,

he was the perfect choice.

Furie possessed Palmer's refusal to bow to convention.

The idea of an anti-Bond came naturally.

Do you think Saltzman was interested in realism?

Was interested in depicting the Cold War as it, you know,

might have been at that time?

Yes, I mean social realism in British cinema

was very much going on at that point.

The kitchen sink dramas up through the 1950s,

this was something that there was very clearly a market for,

very clearly interesting.

Saltzman had looked at that, had found that work exciting.

The director in the end that he chose for The Ipcress File

had been doing some kitchen-sink realism in the UK.

It was a movement that he was interested in.

So to then take that and mix it with the spy genre,

I think it appealed to him, not just as a producer who loved that style,

but also recognising that there was clearly a market for it.

(OTHERWORLDLY SOUNDS)

(RECORDING STOPS)

And what do you make of that?

The Ipcress File is about the collision of science and paranoia.

Brilliant scientists are being kidnapped and brainwashed.

There is mad-cap talk of proton-scattering devices.

Palmer follows the clues, always one step ahead and one step behind.

There are threats from the outside,

but it becomes increasingly clear to Palmer

that there is a double agent in his own department.

The plot, which is incredibly complicated,

is basically about the brain-drain of British scientists,

who seem to be leaving in droves.

Colonel Ross has got Dalby to actually sort of...

who has got the counter-espionage job,

he has just lost the latest scientist on a train.

And his bodyguard was found dead in a pile of mail sacks at the station.

And Palmer is basically his replacement,

and he says, "Do you know, you've really, really got to stop

this abduction of scientists,

otherwise you know, I'm gonna disband this office."

So Dalby, who is already at odds with Ross

because of their class differences and a bit of a martinet -

played by Nigel Green, perfectly, of course -

he puts the pressure on all his men, and Palmer especially,

to try and find what's happening.

The plot of The Ipcress File is one

that opens out quite a convoluted way.

Essentially, Palmer is British intelligence

who is assigned to look into the disappearance

and possible kidnapping of a British scientist.

And several of these scientists have disappeared

or gone away from their posts in an unusual way.

Then in the course of his investigations,

begins to suspect that this is a much broader conspiracy,

and that in fact, some of the people that have hired him,

who he is supposed to trust, may not be as trustworthy as expected.

And he is caught - essentially, he is being set up.

Ipcress literally means Induction of Psychoneurosis

by Conditioned Reflexes under Stress.

And that is really... It's made up, obviously, for the film,

it's the idea of brainwashing, in effect.

There's a bit of a to-do with the CIA,

which really is a sort of a sideline to the plot,

but ends up with one of his colleagues being killed.

He sets out and is kidnapped.

And that's when we start to get into this very dark third act,

that's full of traitors and brainwashing and vulnerability,

and that's where it starts to get very strange.

(CAR ENGINE ROARS)

(TYRES SCREECH FAINTLY)

Look out! (GUNFIRE)

(GUNFIRE STOPS)

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

- Palmer. - Oh, Mr Palmer's just left, sir, with another gentleman.

He said he'd be back soon. Would you like to wait?

Everything is under control, sir.

I'm Palmer.

Other names were discussed for Harry Palmer,

including Richard Harris, Christopher Plummer

and Harry H Corbett.

But the film is unthinkable without Michael Caine.

Born in Rotherhithe, the son of a fish market porter,

he had a magnetism and style all his own.

Harry Palmer would define Caine's entire persona,

as he defined Harry Palmer.

Where character ends and actor begins is a perfect mystery.

Michael Caine was having lunch with his friend Terence Stamp

in the Pickwick Club, which was the great hangout

for actors and directors, film people.

When he received a note from a waiter... from Harry Saltzman,

who was sitting across the room and spotted him. And he said,

"When you've finished, come over and have a coffee with me,

I'd like to talk to you."

So he thought, "Oh, great, I've got a part in a James Bond film."

He walked over, sat down.

And Harry and his wife said, "We've just seen Zulu.

And we really like you, we think you've got something.

I've just acquired the rights to a book called The Ipcress File,

have you read it?"

Caine said, "Actually, I'm half-way through it."

And he said, "I want you to play the hero."

They couldn't give him the name because there was no name,

and Caine said, "Yes."

And that was it. Ten minutes later, he walks back to see Terry Stamp,

he says, "I've just got a starring role in a film.

That's how it's done."

The next time that he met with Harry Saltzman,

and probably again at the Pickwick Club, certainly over lunch,

they said, "Right, one thing we've got to do is find a name" -

because the character in the book doesn't have a name.

And he said, "But we've got to find something that's kind of anonymous.

You can't be... you know, it's got to be the opposite of Bond.

This is what it is, this is the anti-Bond film."

And so they came up and Michael said,

"Well, Harry is a really boring name."

And then he looked across and realised what he'd said.

And...

...Saltzman said, "Don't worry, don't worry, Michael."

He says, "My name isn't Harry, it's Herschel,

so you know, you don't worry about that."

So he embarrassed himself a bit, and he said,

"The most boring person I can think of was a boy at school,

who was considered to be the most boring boy in school,

and his name was Palmer."

So Harry Palmer was born.

And Harry met Harry.

There were other actors looked at,

as there would be with a big project like this,

in Richard Harris and Christopher Plummer.

But what makes Caine so ideal?

Or is this something we project back onto the film?

No, I think he is ideal for an enormous number of reasons

to do with the film itself,

but also to do with what's going on in Britain at the time.

So this film is shot in 1964.

This is the time when you've got working-class artists,

whether they're actors, whether they're musicians,

whether they're creatives, whether they're TV presenters,

coming through the art school system,

coming through the grammar school system, you know,

that flourishing of post-war working-class culture - the Beatles.

You know, you have Melvyn Bragg on television,

you have people coming from places where they'd never have been

joining the establishment, moving into the establishment.

Michael Caine was the perfect working-class hero,

and coming up at just the right moment

in the British social history and British culture.

You have the kitchen sink films that are starting to come up,

you have the Beatles and their regional accents,

which were normalising a different way of speaking,

at the same time as you start to have more and more Cockney actors,

and hearing more and more Cockney accents in major leading roles.

That's not actually how Michael Caine got started.

Michael Caine got his first sort of big supporting role in Zulu,

where he plays quite a patrician,

well-to-do character.

But that of course now, we kind of see as atypical

for the Caine persona.

The Caine persona that we now think of, is the sort of...

bit of a cheeky lad, Cockney,

kind of, you know, you can definitely hear his accent,

and you can see that he is sort of salt of the earth.

And you get that really from two films

that are one year after the other,

which are The Ipcress File and then Alfie.

The Michael Caine persona, as we kind of now understand it,

is completely borne through this film.

And all of this appealed to him because of his own rise,

which was a struggle.

You know, Michael Caine wasn't an overnight star,

he had worked very hard, and had a lot of disappointments.

He'd only done a couple of films.

He'd done A Hill in Korea, he had also, of course,

you know, had combat experience in Korea.

So all of this kind of pulled together, and you think,

he thought, "Yes, this is for me."

And in fact, even now when you think back,

of all the people who might have played that role,

I can't think of anyone who was more appropriate

and who was more fitted for the role of Harry Palmer than Michael Caine.

Palmer represents an upwardly mobile post-war Britain,

whereas his bosses are antiques.

Caine's performance is pitch perfect.

Aloof, wry, a working-class chip on his shoulder,

but hints of a heart beneath the icy calm.

Deighton was the son of a professional cook,

and invested his epicurean habits into Palmer.

The character is in touch with sensual pleasures.

He loves good food, books and Mozart.

We even get a scene of Palmer being interrogated in a supermarket.

(WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYS IN STORE)

Oh. Good morning, sir.

Champignon.

You're paying tenpence more for a fancy French label.

If you want button mushrooms, you'll get better value on the next shelf.

It's not just the label, these do have a better flavour.

Of course. You're quite a gourmet, aren't you Palmer?

James Bond sort of delivered what we thought we knew about spies.

Fleming was very smart at that.

You know, he was himself, I think, probably using James Bond

as a sort of fantasy extension of his own -

if not himself, then his own desired self.

I think generally speaking,

when the spies that we did have started to sort of emerge,

and the traitors used to emerge,

they kind of conformed to that kind of stereotype.

Of course, that is only one stereotype, there is only one level.

And what Deighton did, and what The Ipcress File does,

and what Caine did specifically, is show that, of course,

that there are many levels. There are many levels of this.

One of the fascinating elements of the film

is the mistrust within the service itself.

Bosses spy on their own agents,

interdepartmental rivalries fester.

There are constant references to the people upstairs.

Allegiances are obscure.

There is a crucial emphasis on the class divide

between Caine's salty, street-wise foot soldier,

and his snooty superiors in Nigel Green's Major Dalby

and Guy Dolman's Colonel Ross.

The film is full of unconventional takes on genre archetypes.

Freda Bamford as the chain-smoking secretary Alice

is a wonderfully sour inversion of Miss Moneypenny.

Fellow agent Gordon Jackson grumbles about the paperwork.

Even Sue Lloyd as the glamorous female agent placed in Palmer's path

has an air of world weariness.

The whole film is closed in the gloomy officialdom

of the British civil service.

I think it has plenty to say about the British class system,

in that, ultimately, the people that can't be trusted,

are you know, quite upper crust people.

And it goes back a bit to what the famous Soviet/British spy

Kim Philby said,

which was that no-one ever suspected him of being a secret agent,

because he was born to the British ruling class.

And there was just a certain arrogance or expectation

amongst a certain class of person

with a certain education and background,

that you know, he couldn't possibly have been a traitor or treasonous.

And that's sort of the sense that you get

with The Ipcress File as well, and it takes a more...

say, disposable working-class man, our protagonist,

to begin to pull the thread

that unravels the reality of this kind of rot within.

The truth is, there is very little action in The Ipcress File.

It is a study in legwork and investigative hunches,

a man navigating a maze.

The great production designer, Ken Adam,

veteran of Bond's grandiose sets,

works wonders with warehouses and bedsits.

There wasn't the budget to feature Beirut,

or the Tokwe Atoll visited by the book.

But Furie makes full use of his London locations.

Deighton considered the city to be the centre of the world,

with the Cold War on its doorstep.

Shot in near monochrome,

the drama covers 26 principal locations

from Shepherd's Bush to St Katharine's Docks.

There is a touch of Hitchcock in the occasional landmark,

such as The Albert Hall and Hyde Park.

This is a working city oblivious to the games of spies.

(WIND GUSTING)

(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

The London, the backdrop, is so splendidly ordinary.

You know, although it's shot in this kind of very dramatic way,

it's a working city, it's a place that's oblivious

to this undercurrent that we see.

I think this is possibly the only spy film set in London

that doesn't have, at some point, a sky shot of Big Ben.

I mean that's the standard thing, as soon as you get to London,

there's a shot of Big Ben, and there's no Big Ben in this at all.

The only monument is the Albert Hall,

but there's actually also a geographical reason for that,

because the scientists were at Imperial College,

which is two doors down from the Albert Hall,

so it makes sense for that action to take place there.

It's probably also a budget and scheduling decision,

but it is... that's the one thing you see.

This is a London which is emerging from the 1950s,

it's a London which is leaving behind rationing,

it's leaving behind the sort of decrepitude of the Suez era,

and it's just about to step into Swinging London.

This film was shot in '64, was released in '65,

1965 is the year that Vogue and Time

both coined the phrase "Swinging London".

Everybody thinks the sixties was the Swinging Sixties,

of course it wasn't.

It had to still emerge from the post-war fifties.

And that took rather a long time,

and this is exactly on the cusp of it.

And that's what's so brilliant about the way the film looks,

is made and is performed.

Because you've got in Michael Caine,

you've got a star who embodies that change.

That change in the way that...

actors like him were coming out of their sort of...

out of the doldrums even, and into the bright light of stardom.

They hadn't had the chance before, they did now.

So he was emblematic of that. He was a sort of talisman.

But also, it's... you know, much of the film is very grey and grim.

In fact, if you...

Sometimes I think, when I think of The Ipcress File,

I think it was shot in black and white.

That's how powerful it has been made.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

(TYRES SCREECH)

(SMOOTH JAZZY MUSIC)

(MUSIC ENDS) (TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)

The Cold War was creeping ever closer to home.

In 1963, two years before the film came out,

Kim Philby was exposed as a traitor

at the heart of the British Secret Service.

Sporting the most iconic glasses in film history,

Palmer stalks a cool and angular London,

not knowing who to trust.

(SOMBRE BRASS MUSIC)

MAN: Colonel, have men from your unit undergone questioning

by the Mansfield Intelligence people on exercise?

Oh, yes. I have asked them to interrogate my chaps.

Now it's been said that methods outside the Geneva Convention

have been used on the interrogation, is that true?

Perfectly true. The whole idea of these exercises

is to teach my men to resist interrogation.

Has physical violence been used?

No, not on any of these exercises.

Now, it's been alleged that men have been locked in sentry boxes,

and then, from time to time, been doused in cold water.

(BRASS MUSIC BUILDS, BECOMES TENSE)

(CHAIR RATTLING)

(AIR WHISTLING)

Harry himself, who is then captured,

and subjected to this very technique,

that's one of the key moments of the film.

It takes you right out of the sort of espionage game.

He is on a train, and of course, once a spy gets onto a train,

you know he's in danger. It is the...

You know, it is absolutely the sort of,

the great sort of moment in any film, when a spy gets on a train,

whether it be James Bond or Richard Hannay or anybody.

They're in danger. Something is going to happen.

And what happens is that he's knocked out,

then he wakes up, apparently in Albania, in a prison,

where he is subjected to this psychological torture.

(ECHOEY) Relax.

Quite relaxed. (PALMER WHIMPERS)

Listen to my voice.

A key paranoia of the Cold War

was the fear of being brainwashed into the communist philosophy.

Within the film, an outlandish technology

scrambles the cortex of scientists.

The brainwashing sequences in sickening bold colours

bring a futuristic shock to the genre.

They also serve as a symbol.

Palmer resists the brainwashing by staying true to himself,

just as he resists being brainwashed by his masters.

Brainwashing was something of a paranoia

during the Cold War, wasn't it?

This idea that the communist way of life, you could wake up one morning

and you've been transformed into somebody else.

The brainwashing thing interestingly also for Len Deighton,

as someone who worked in advertising,

it was also a big thing in advertising,

this idea of subliminal advertising.

The idea that you could convey your messages to someone's brains

through a very particular way.

So this is where the world of intelligence and of ad-land,

which is where Deighton sat.

I mean, he was right on the... experiential curve there.

He really could understand that debate.

He'd read a lot of the accounts by American servicemen,

people who had been tortured by communists in Hungary.

He'd read these things and he sort of bought into it.

I mean, I think it's a sort of a...

You know, it's kind of a busted flush in neuroscience now,

the idea of brainwashing.

But there was this absolute perception

which echoes that Victorian fear of hypnotism, that you can take...

The perfect agent is someone who doesn't know they're your agent,

and that can go over and commit the crime

when the trigger word is made, and they do the terrible thing.

It is something that's repeated quite a lot in films.

Particularly... You know, before the war it would be hypnotism,

after the war it's brainwashing, and you cannot control your own people.

Furie's visual approach is as unorthodox as his hero.

Taking a cue from Palmer's poor eyesight,

cinematographer Otto Heller

captures the morally obscure world of the Cold War,

through acute angles, distorting lenses,

and frame-in-frame compositions.

Foregrounds dominate, distancing us from scenes.

A crucial punch-up is shot through telephone box windows.

As Caine said, it's as if someone else was watching events.

One of the prime reasons that Ipcress File looks so great,

and why it is so intimate in a way,

is the director Sidney J Furie,

and his cinematographer Otto Heller.

Sidney J Furie was a Canadian who made a few films in Canada,

but they had terrible distribution,

and he got rather dispirited by that.

He saw what was happening in Britain,

he saw that there was a thriving industry, something was going on.

So he avoided going to the States, he came straight to the UK.

What he did and what he does with The Ipcress File

is absolutely extraordinary.

It's almost Avant-garde filmmaking.

He is... He obviously knew his noir,

he obviously knew his German expressionism.

He obviously knew how to sort of use...

A great deal of the shots in Ipcress File

are shot through something.

They were using a new lens, or a new format, actually,

called Techniscope, which meant it had a greater depth of field.

So he could shoot through a car window

at somebody running towards it, as Michael Caine does,

at the Albert Hall, and slam against it.

And you can see him from the distance.

But he does all sorts of shots.

He shoots through glasses lenses. He shoots through grilles.

The action is happening outside,

but what you're doing is you're in the POV of the potential victim.

This gives the film an incredible immediacy.

The call comes from composer John Barry.

Saltzman knew well enough to bring in the genius

who had created an entire world for Bond.

In an unforgettable melody,

plucked on the metal strings of a Hungarian cimbalom,

Barry captures the witty subversion in the character

and an aura of the Cold War.

There are hints of the zither from The Third Man,

but underneath swirl electronic chords.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

(PLUCKY STRING MELODY)

John Barry is famous for his Bond score, of course,

for arranging and performing that famous score,

and using an electric guitar to do so.

So again, somebody that you would associate with the modern

in many ways. But this is a different score.

It's quite unusual, and when you hear the beginnings of it,

right at the start of the film, it's particularly interesting,

because it's quite spiky, it's quite an angular score.

And he uses this unusual Hungarian instrument called the cimbalom,

which gives it quite sort of an early electronic sound,

which gives the sense about tech,

about the kind of aural dissonance

that you get from the sound of the Ipcress tape,

and it heightens the sense that there's something kind of strange

and technologically unsound going on.

It's not an old-fashioned score, but it's also not

a kind of contemporary rock-and-roll-sounding score.

It is something that's very distinct.

Moody, yet charming.

Audiences lapped up the defiance of Harry Palmer, as did the critics.

And The Ipcress File would win the BAFTA for Best British Film,

and be nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

The character is such a fascinating contradiction,

this ice-cold spy, cynical and self-serving,

and a man of culture,

who loves nothing more than a good cup of coffee.

Caine made him human, this wise-cracking cold warrior,

who is a thorn in the side of the establishment.

The Ipcress File launched his career.

He went straight on to Alfie, and never looked back.

His stylishly humdrum spy came to epitomise the Swinging Sixties.

It's not just that it's got all of those stylistic influences,

it's that it's also about the time that it is filmed.

It is nailing a moment in history.

It's like a Russian doll.

You just keep opening and keep opening the film,

and there's more and more to learn, there's more and more about it.

It's a piece of history in its own right, and it...

All the gathering together of all these influences

and all these moments at that point,

to create this wonderful influential thing.

And that's, I think, why it becomes such an iconic piece of work.

It did things first, and it did them better.

And understanding how they did them is phenomenal.

As Saltzman had hoped, the success of The Ipcress File

led to two further Deighton adaptations,

in Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain.

Taking Caine's Palmer out onto the chess board of Europe.

But it is The Ipcress File that stands as a classic.

It set the legacy for the genre.

Its nihilistic games, its disillusioned players,

its defeat of the establishment.

A masterful depiction of a changing Britain

in a new world order.

Thank you. (CONDUCTOR'S WHISTLE BLOWS)

(TRAIN WHISTLES, RUMBLES)

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