The Ipcress File (1965) on Netflix
A scientist is seized from a train and the agent with him is killed. Harry Palmer, an army sergeant with a criminal past, is moved into Major Dalby's section to find him.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.1/1019,827 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Harry Palmer is a British Army sergeant with a criminal past and a habit of talking back to his superiors. Colonel Ross moves him out of routine surveillance and into a counter-espionage section run by Major Dalby, where the agents are trying to trace whoever is behind the loss of Britain's leading scientists. Their newest case is Radcliffe, seized off a train while the agent guarding him was killed, and Dalby's unit will be abolished if the man is not recovered. Dalby gives the team two names to work with: Eric Grantby, codenamed Bluejay, and his chief of staff, Housemartin. Palmer takes up the case alongside two colleagues in the section, Jock Carswell and Jean Courtney.
Cast
- Pauline Winteras Charlady
- Anthony Blackshawas Edwards
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Ipcress File (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Harry Saltzman gave Jimmy Sangster a copy of the novel to read. Sangster was eager to adapt it and suggested Michael Caine to play the main role and Sidney J. Furie as director, but Saltzman would not commit to the timeframe that Sangster insisted upon.
- The film was shot in Techniscope, a format that splits the normal 35mm frame in half horizontally and uses lenses of shorter focal length, which allowed cinematographer Otto Heller to construct images in deep focus, with objects in the foreground and action in the background both sharp.
- Caine revealed that Heller, a German Jew who had got out of Nazi Germany only in 1939, pretended throughout his career in Britain to read his light meter. The instrument was found after he died to have been “dead forever”; Heller lit scenes “wonderfully” using only eyesight, but felt obliged to look as though he used one.
- The newspaper cuttings shown in Palmer's kitchen are real cookery articles written for The Observer by Deighton, an accomplished cook himself. When Caine could not manage to crack an egg with one hand for the cooking scene, the hands seen in close-up were Deighton's own.
- John Barry, who had worked on all of the Bond films up to this time, composed the score and made prominent use of a cimbalom, as opposed to the electric guitar which carried the melody in the “James Bond Theme”.
- The complex electronic sound effect of the brain-washing process was conceived by sound engineer Norman Wanstall and created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
