Freed from Bondage

The Ipcress File, based on a thriller by British Author Len Deighton, offers a new breed of spy hero, freed from Bondage to preposterous gags and gimmickry. Harry Palmer, British secret agent, is a scruffy non-U type who too often finds himself tied to a desk, eying the girls through thick spectacles and a jungle of red tape. To get a TX-82 riot squad authorization, he needs a 3-H security clearance. And he, no sooner takes on a case than he must file those bloody L-101 progress reports. In his off-hours, though, Harry enjoys fine cuisine, whipped up in his own kitchen. News of a -L-100 raise sets him to musing, "Now I can get that new infra-red grill."

Palmer is played with deft, dry precision by Actor Michael Caine, who looks a bit like Peter O'Toole with most of the psychological kinks ironed out. Insubordinate and often insufferable, he is assigned to recover a kidnaped British scientist held by criminals who contribute to the nation's "brain drain" by snatching and selling top scientific talent to foreign powers.

While his superiors haggle over procedure, Palmer slogs through some of London's more picturesque byways and inadvertently slays a CIA agent during a throat-tightening exchange scene in an underground garage, where triggermen and headlights dare each other to blink. The scientist is ransomed, but his memory seems oddly impaired. Soon the hero is fleeing kidnapers, the CIA, and an unknown British traitor or two. After one fracas aboard a boat train to Paris, he wakes up drugged in what appears to be an Albanian prison--actually, it's somewhere in the center of London--and begins squirming toward the conclusion of a nightmare plot to scramble British brainpower.

Between crises, Director Sidney Furie makes even the drudgery of espionage engrossing, though his overzealous camera style occasionally impedes the action. He films through keyholes, transoms, and parking meters, mounts wild-angled shots from floor or ceiling until, finally, a fly's-eye view of a corpse, framed in a dangling lampshade, begins to make whodunit seem less important than how it was done. But when Furie abates, Ipcress proves again that one of the primal pleasures of moviegoing is a tingling, no-nonsense suspense yarn enlivened by honest good humor.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.