The Ipcress File at Sixty
One of the most iconic films in the espionage genre turns sixty this week: The Ipcress File was released on 18 March 1965, its dour urban setting in complete contrast to the prevailing winds then blowing through spy fiction in the cinema and on television. Espionage on the big and small screen was becoming increasingly ironic and camp, but The Ipcress File managed to have its cake and eat it, cashing in on the spy boom whilst striking out in a completely new direction.
John Le Carré had already signalled the beginning of a move towards realism in espionage fiction with his 1961 novel Call For the Dead, and more famously, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But neither film had yet been adapted for the cinema.
Len Deighton’s source novel had appeared between Le Carré’s first two works, and he was most likely working on it when Call for the Dead was published. Was he influenced by Le Carré? It’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t, although he later cited as inspiration the story of a neighbour who had spied for Germany during the Second World War, along with Raymond Chandler (for the cynical, first person narrative) and an old Bogart movie, Beat the Devil.
Deighton had been working as a successful book jacket designer, and earned enough from his work to try his hand as a novelist. The Ipcress File was his first attempt at writing and, frankly, you can tell. He later claimed that he wanted the book to be ‘ragged and untidy, as life is’ when in fact it’s ragged and untidy as a badly-edited first draft novel is. On paper, The Ipcress File isn’t far off being a car crash. It’s hard to see what attracted Harry Salzman to it as a potential movie property, aside from the obvious: this was an era when almost any work of spy fiction was bound to attract the attention of filmmakers. Deighton knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to write an espionage novel.
Stylistically, The Ipcress File is pitched somewhere between the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dasheill Hammett and the down-to-earth prosaic spy novels of Le Carré. Bond is clearly an influence too, though you wouldn’t guess it from the film which ditches the novel’s exotic locations (Beirut and the South Pacific). Deighton, a keen historian, fleshes out his text with a plethora of detail, blending fiction and reality. There are (inevitably) name checks for Burgess and Maclean, whose story he co-opts as background for the spy codenamed Jay (the film makes him ‘Bluejay’ in a nod to American audiences), and he provides an accurate description of a nuclear test facility where an experimental neutron bomb is to be exploded (the neutron bomb was bang up to the minute stuff – if you’ll forgive the pun – still in the theoretical stage at the time).
Commentators all point to the supposedly working class background of Deighton’s unnamed protagonist, but in all honesty he doesn’t make that big a deal out of it, and the character drops so many learned cultural references in his narrative that it’s hard to accept him as anything other than a well educated and erudite individual. We see some of this in the film – Palmer is a music lover, gourmet and cook, but he’s no way the kind of clued-up smart arse we meet on paper.
To mark the film’s sixtieth anniversary, I wanted to understand where it diverges from the source novel, which I’d never previously read. In fact, the novel is as unlike the movie as any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. The screenplay is essentially a stripped down version of ideas from Deighton’s text, which it refashions into a much tighter yet still complex narrative. As written, the novel would have been unfilmable without a huge budget, so the elisions are to some extent understandable, but the text is also quite badly structured, with a long drawn out final section that includes some unbelievably clunky exposition where the narrator explains what’s been happening to his assistant Jean Tonnensen (one suspects this was added at the behest of an editor, Deighton’s having left so many dangling plot points throughout the text).
Here’s a summary of the key differences:
Harry Palmer: any film buff will tell you that the name Harry Palmer was created to serve the movie. In the book, the narrator informs us: “Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been.” The character in fact changes his identity during the course of the narrative (for no obvious reason), collecting a whole package of documents and items such as a false passport and a police warrant card. The novel’s protagonist actually assumes control of Dalby’s department in his absence, and is clearly an older, more senior figure than the Harry Palmer we meet on screen. The movie Palmer is seen cooking and shopping, but there are no such scenes in the book. His only encounter with a kitchen is when he watches Jay cooking a lobster.
Location: The film makes a virtue of its London settings, contrasting the gentility of Regents’ Park (favoured by Dalby and Ross) with the grimier backstreets where Palmer lives and works. The novel adopts a similar setting for much of the action, but there are interludes in Beirut (where the kidnapped scientist is retaken by force in an operation involving Dalby and the narrator) and a Pacifc atoll where a bomb test is about to take place. Here, the narrator is framed, arrested as a spy and wakes up in a cell, seemingly somewhere behind the iron curtain.
Supporting Characters: Ross and Dalby and both present in the novel, although their personalities seem to have been switched for the film. On paper, Dalby is quite young, blonde haired and clearly an ex-public school type, while Ross, older, moustached and balding, is more like the uptight military persona of Nigel Green’s Dalby. Palmer’s relationship with Dalby is tense and fractious on screen, whereas in the book the two characters are more like equals with a sparring, slightly jokey relationship. Courtney (Sue Lloyd) is Jean in print, and the relationship between her and ‘Palmer’ is far less obvious; Carswell (Gordon Jackson) is a different character entirely in the text, much older, and a statistician who is trying to find patterns in the records of missing persons. He doesn’t borrow a car and isn’t shot in mistake for ‘Palmer’. The novel’s spymaster Jay becomes Bluejay in the movie, and is given an English-sounding identity (Grantby) where the ‘Jay’ of the novel has an Eastern European name. The dowdy ‘Alice’ on screen is a much younger character in the book.
Action: Most of the iconic scenes in the film were crafted for the screenplay: in the novel, the kidnapping of the scientist is not shown, neither is the handover in the underground car park (Dalby and the narrator ambush his captors on the road in Beirut). Carswell isn’t killed in print (although a similar fate befalls an old friend whom the protagonist calls on after escaping from captivity). The warehouse where the IPCRESS tape is discovered is a domestic residence in the book (and the tape is not labelled). On screen, Palmer is abducted on a train, whereas the novel’s protagonist is arrested at the bomb test location. Most tellingly, there is no brainwashing sequence. The indoctrination techniques described in the book are a far cry from the audio-visual torture Palmer undergoes on screen. In the book, there is no IPCRESS noise, no hypnotic visuals, and no trigger phrase ('now listen to me...')
Following his escape, the action in the novel rather loses its way – the narrator calls on an old friend (who is susequently murdered), before travelling to Dalby’s country cottage where he sees Jay and one of his captors. Jay is followed to London and arrested by Ross: Dalby is later reported to have died in a car accident. The movie’s classic ending, with Dalby and Ross held at gunpoint by Palmer while Dalby orders him to ‘shoot the traitor’ is nowhere to be found. The novel peters out in twenty pages of rather laboured and undramatic exposition.
In the film, following the warehouse raid, Dalby testily complains to one of the detectives that their tardiness in starting the operation isn’t good enough. Having now read the original Ipcress File, I might make the same observation. There are good ideas present, but the text really needed sharpening and re-editing, quite heavily in my opinion. Deighton starts out well, and the style is sharply laconic, but the plot structure slowly comes apart, and the scenes on the bomb test atoll are, frankly, unnecessary. He’s also not very good at describing action sequences, and one is often left wondering exactly what’s meant to be happening. His narrator, so memorably portrayed on celluloid by Michael Caine, is less of the insubordinate cheery cockney and more of a cynical know-all, who uses jargon without explanation. I wonder whether this was rather in the nature of a self portrait? The book is also the only novel I have ever encountered where passages cut from the text are served up wholesale in an appendix. None of them is really necessary, and in many cases they serve only to let the reader know the extent of Deighton’s arcane knowledge of matters such as the going rate for Indian Hemp or recipes for some clearly fictitious cocktails.
It’s arguable that the reputation of Deighton’s novel relies almost entirely on the film, which improves upon it in almost every conceivable way. The film isn’t entirely without its flaws, though: if anyone can explain to me how Grantby manages to abduct Radcliffe in the opening scene, then immediately kill and dispose of his escort (who is seen only seconds later dumped in a baggage trolley), I’d be glad to hear from them!
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Panther's film tie-in edition of The Ipcress File: left, cover, right, inside cover |