The Ipcress File. 1965. UK. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Screenplay by Bill Canaway, James Doran, based on the novel by Len Deighton. With Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman. 35mm courtesy Universal Pictures. 109
Produced by James Bond movie mogul Harry Salzman, the excellent spy thriller The Ipcress File, about the hunt for a kidnapped scientist, was intended to launch a thinking man’s 007 franchise, one somehow truer to the drudgeries of Cold War spycraft in MI5. Michael Caine’s famously bespectacled interpretation of author Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer—an “ordinary and unglamorous” thief turned reluctant undercover agent—proved a great box office and critical success and led to two more Palmer movies: Guy Hamilton’s Funeral in Berlin and Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain. (Caine appeared in another pair of Palmer movies in the mid-1990s, but the less said the better). “The Ipcress File was the first movie in which my name was ‘above the title,’” Caine recalled. “Harry Salzman decided to do this even though it was not in my contract. When I asked him why, he said: ‘If I don’t think you’re a star, who the hell else will?’”