Michael Caine’s Supermarket Sweep.
Michael Caine makes scrambled eggs like a man expecting to be surveilled, seduced, or shot before breakfast. The fastidious culinary interlude in The Ipcress File isn’t just a character flourish – it’s a quiet act of rebellion in a genre usually too busy bedding women or detonating volcanoes to consider seasoning. This is what Cold War espionage looks like when you take the martini out of the hand, the tux off the back, and swap the Aston Martin for a filing cabinet.
The Ipcress File arrived in 1965, barely a year after Goldfinger turned Bond from spy to superhero, and deliberately planted its feet in the drab, paranoid offices of British intelligence bureaucracy. Its protagonist, Harry Palmer, is every inch the anti-Bond: glasses instead of gadgets, sarcasm instead of suavity, and a professional relationship with rules, paperwork, and the chain of command. Where Bond swaggers through consequence-free excess, Palmer spends half the film being bollocked by two different bosses, hunted by his own side, and harassed by his own kettle.
There’s a tangibly British sense of pettiness that permeates the film’s approach to spycraft. Directed by Sidney J. Furie with a kind of conspiratorial intimacy – all canted angles, obstructed framing and peeks from behind doorways – The Ipcress File weaponises the mundane. Its espionage isn’t exotic; it’s administered in forms, shunted between departments, buried under bureaucracy and compromised by office politics. That it still manages to be suspenseful, engaging and occasionally rather stylish is a small marvel.
What sharpens the film’s subversion is that it recruits Bond’s own artisans to dismantle his mystique. Ken Adam, architect of some of Bond’s most fantastical environments, brings his signature bold visual geometry to bureaucratic dread – his IPCRESS brainwashing chamber is less supervillain lair, more sensory torture device. And John Barry, instead of serving up his usual brassy swagger, gives the film a score that creeps and shivers. The cimbalom, not the trumpet, leads the charge, suggesting espionage as anxiety, not adventure. The Ipcress File doesn’t just push back against Bond – it does so from within the same stylistic war room, making its departure all the more pointed.
Furie and screenwriter W H Canaway lean into Len Deighton’s original novel, maintaining its dry humour and procedural grit. The film changes a few details – chiefly giving Palmer a name, as Deighton’s original protagonist was resolutely anonymous – but keeps the wry detachment and matter-of-fact menace intact. It lacks the introspective weariness of John le Carré’s George Smiley stories, but shares their appreciation of ambiguity, their distrust of easy answers. The Ipcress File inhabits the space between the bare-chested fantasy of Fleming and the burnt-out cynicism of le Carré, drawing both style and suspicion into a world where even a tape labelled “IPCRESS” can be a threat more potent than a bullet.
Caine is superb as Palmer, radiating insolence and reluctant competence. His performance makes the character’s refusal to play the gentleman-spy game look like its own form of quiet courage. Palmer doesn’t want to save the world; he just wants a decent meal and maybe a bit of Bach. He’s the reluctant middle manager of international espionage, scolded for using resources, shunted between projects, and nearly brainwashed in a basement for his trouble. That the brainwashing scene works as well as it does is down to Caine’s ability to suggest panic under pressure and Furie’s aggressive direction, which takes visual disorientation seriously long before The Parallax View or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy tried similar tricks.
If the film falters anywhere, it’s in a final act that stretches its modest budget and patience slightly thin, but by that point the world it’s built has done the heavy lifting. The Ipcress File doesn’t try to out-Bond Bond. It refuses the comparison entirely, choosing instead to tell a story about ordinary people in extraordinary jobs, where glamour is a paperclip and death is a memo away. It set the tone for two sequels, countless imitators, and the idea that maybe espionage wasn’t always about the fate of the world, but sometimes just about who signs the forms when it all goes sideways.
Half a century on, it still wears its ordinariness like armour. Cool, competent and just a little cross about the whole thing, The Ipcress File remains a quietly counter-counterculture piece of spy fiction.
