We filled in another Michael Caine blank last night by watching The Ipcress File. Adapted from Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, the movie opens when a government scientist named Radcliffe disappears from a train with a piece of important technological equipment—a “proto proton scattering device.” He’s one of seventeen scientists to disappear in the last two years, but the presumption is that he’s alive somewhere. Caine, an “insolent, insubordinate, trickster,” is assigned to a Home Office department tasked with the case. Pretty quickly he gets a line on the missing equipment and his bosses decide to buy it back. They manage it, and retrieve Radcliffe too, though he doesn’t remember anything that happened to him. But there may be more going on than mere amnesia.
The first thing you’ll notice about The Ipcress File is its canted angles. There are dozens of such shots. Generally they’re used in film to heighten tension, or denote a fundamental change in the nature of a narrative. For instance Steven Spielberg uses one in Jaws the first time Roy Schieder sees the shark. Everything has changed from that point, because they’re definitely “gonna need a bigger boat.” In The Ipcress File these angles decrease as the movie progresses and Caine gets closer to the truth. We thought the backwards use of the device was pretty clever.
There are numerous other unusual camera techniques used as well, some just for style, such as a few references to film noir, and others used symbolically (keep an eye out for a bright red lampshade used in combination with an important plot revelation). There’s a lot of exterior work too, so you’ll get to see a London that has largely gone under the bulldozer as the city was remade into the favored money laundering center it is today. In fact, merits of the story aside, The Ipcress File is a filmmaking clinic. Director Sidney J. Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller deserve a lot of credit for thinking outside the box—or overthinking, depending on your opinion.
The Ipcress File was meant to be an anti-Bond, a prosaically realistic spy movie, as opposed to the flair and gadgetry of the Connery series. But purely on paper it’s not actually much different from Bond—it’s just paced more deliberately. Caine still beds down with a willing helper (Sue Lloyd). Other spies are still shot dead. While there are some nods to boring paperwork and grinding bureaucracy, in order to put bottoms in cinema seats spy movies need action and The Ipcress File has enough to sustain its momentum. The fact that it spawned four sequels says plenty. Like many Caine films its reputation has grown after some tepid contemporary reviews, to the point that it’s now revered by most lovers of British film. We wouldn’t say it deserves reverence. But it’s very respectable. It premiered today in 1965.
