{"id":14556,"date":"2020-07-28T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14556"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:18:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:18:54","slug":"three-non-bonds-the-strange-tale-of-the-harry-palmer-trilogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/three-non-bonds-the-strange-tale-of-the-harry-palmer-trilogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Non-Bonds: The Strange Tale of the Harry Palmer Trilogy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Harry Palmer\u2019s personal file reads like a permanent record: \u201cInsubordinate, insolent, a trickster…perhaps with criminal tendencies.\u201d When his new boss, another stiff-upper-lip with a patriotic apathy for human life, reads it back to him, Palmer cocks a proper Jack-the-Lad grin and admits, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s a pretty fair appraisal, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In author Len Deighton\u2019s world of espionage, there are no heroes or villains, just contractors and con artists who sometimes forget which flag is pinned to their lapel. Over the course of five novels, Deighton\u2019s unnamed agent toils away in workaday squalor for WOOC(P), a British Intelligence unit that also goes unnamed, though the P may or may not stand for Provisional. Most of his life is spent in the perpetual gray of London, assuming the same color in departmental meetings and keeping a paranoid eye between blinds in his flat. The only vice he knows is cooking, a shared passion with Deighton, who doubled for Palmer\u2019s hands in the kitchen scenes. If James Bond works for Queen and Country, Deighton\u2019s man works for pension and procedure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harry Saltzman, half of the Powers That Be behind Bond\u2019s early cinematic success, had vested interest in the difference: Every red-blooded producer in the world wanted their own 007 franchise and he already had one. Instead of burying the anonymous spy in shameless imitation, Saltzman wanted him as-is, headier counterprogramming for audiences who\u2019d had enough cereal-box gadgetry. Naming the character was as easy as casting him – when Harry Saltzman asked Michael Caine for the most boring name he could think of, he said \u201cHarry\u201d without hesitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In all the ways that James Bond could be played with equal credibility by a rough-edged Scot, an untrained Australian, and a Welsh Shakespearean, Harry Palmer couldn\u2019t be played by anyone else but Michael Caine. Even if certain characters and farther-flung locales were lost in the translation, the man on the screen and the narrator on the page are one in the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ipcress File <\/em>introduces him in appropriately modest style, refusing to open his eyes as he grinds the morning coffee. Palmer works the Boonton Insta-Brewer with the same mechanical grace that his contemporaries save for assembling sniper rifles. Despite the murderer\u2019s row of Bond veterans behind the camera – series composer John Barry, editor Peter Hunt, production designer and father of the volcano lair Ken Adams – Ipcress <\/em>looks and sounds closer to film noir than spy-fi. Palmer\u2019s bosses are framed like monuments to forgotten wars and move about as much. Scenes aren\u2019t staged but surveilled, peeked at through keyholes and stolen from the cross-hatched glass of phone booths. Abiding by his own famed acting advice, Caine never blinks, turning Palmer\u2019s iconic Curry & Paxton sunglasses into half-lidded security cameras. Always rolling, never surprised, like the mod jazz that follows him around and the skeptical dulcimer that so often interrupts it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saltzman\u2019s game worked. Newsweek called Ipcress<\/em> \u201cthe thinking man\u2019s Goldfinger<\/em>.\u201d Variety deemed it the \u201cAnti-Bond.\u201d The secret ingredient was director Sidney J. Furie, a toiling Canadian ex-pat hungry to make his mark. The film\u2019s climax, the IPCRESS in Ipcress File<\/em>, could pass for lesser climax on Batman<\/em>. Furie makes it torture, only the latest diplomatic screw turned on Palmer\u2019s continued employment. During a parking garage trade of money for man, Harry Palmer is just another suit holding a submachine gun, watching the slow-motion waltz and hoping nobody steps on the wrong foot. It\u2019s a sequence the sequels never quite match for soot-black beauty and clockwork suspense. Furie\u2019s work won the film a BAFTA and a nomination for the Palme d\u2019Or.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Saltzman hated Furie regardless and swapped him out with Guy Hamilton, director of the non-thinking man\u2019s Goldfinger<\/em>, to handle the sequel, Funeral in Berlin<\/em>. Due to his own illicit past, the same that keeps him unhappily blackmailed into service, Harry Palmer is enlisted to aid in the defection of a Soviet colonel. When he arrives, Palmer finds a familiar house of cards no more structurally sound than the other bombed-out ruins of East Berlin. Considering Saltzman\u2019s disdain for Furie\u2019s visual eccentricities, the sequel\u2019s conventionality is as much a feature as it is a flaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funeral in Berlin <\/em>may be the shortest of the three pictures, but it feels the longest. This is cloak and dagger played at realistic, agonizing speed. Most of the first hour is spent on loaded conversations under cover of urban decay, Palmer\u2019s security camera eyes waiting for old friends to blink first. Names, real and otherwise, litter the ground like spent bullet casings. Miss a line and the whole plot changes. Palmer gets no such luxury. Neither does the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funeral in Berlin <\/em>is just as unforgiving on the eyes. Hamilton and series cinematographer Otto Heller shoot the city like a charcoal relief. The only thing separating Palmer from the expressionist sprawl trying to swallow him is his trusty trenchcoat. The grit gets under your nails, thanks in no small part to Hamilton\u2019s personal experience in World War II. Even Konrad Elfer\u2019s score has less play to it than Barry\u2019s, sneaking only a little jazz into its sarcastic military march. As a result, Funeral <\/em>plays like historical reenactment, as close to the real deal as legally permitted – Ian Fleming, a fan, correctly guessed Deighton\u2019s career in military intelligence based on the detail of his books. Early on, Palmer laments the stuffy name given in his falsified passport. When asked for a request, he offers \u201cRock Hunter.\u201d Not in this movie. Not for this spy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the beginning of Billion Dollar Brain<\/em>, Harry Palmer isn\u2019t a spy at all. He\u2019s given it up for the grimy life of a private investigator; he even has taped-up clippings of Bogart and Batman to prove it. But then an anonymous phone call from somebody with a robotic voice drags him back into a business where \u201cWhat\u2019s the catch?\u201d and \u201cWho gets killed?\u201d are entirely different questions. In a move that all parties would later regret, provocateur-in-training Ken Russell took over directing duties, making the big-budget sequel his second-ever feature film. As a result, in all the ways Funeral <\/em>was staid, Brain <\/em>is bananas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Palmer is jerked from one end of the globe to the other, then back again to uncover the next non sequitur clue. Heller shoots it all like a gauzy dream. Coupled with Richard Rodney Bennett\u2019s gorgeous score, all twinkling piano and woozy theremin, the most mundane action, like a short jaunt on snowmobiles, becomes avant garde ads for men\u2019s winterwear. In Ipcress<\/em>, the camera was always watching Harry. In Funeral<\/em>, the camera was always abandoning him. In Brain<\/em>, the camera is <\/em>Harry, hot-zooming in and out on byzantine parapets of old cathedrals and gilded murals of brave men on horseback. He\u2019s a professional tourist forced to gawk at one sight after the next, given as little context as he can piece together himself. Trust is psychosexual – men undressing in front of each other is the currency of good faith – and the apocalypse is bad Freud – a fleet of tanker trucks ready to spill armies of men in white fatigues and smooth helmets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was too weird for audiences and critics in 1967, just six months after Sean Connery\u2019s first retirement with You Only Live Twice<\/em>. Box office receipts killed the planned sequel, Horse Under Water<\/em>, based on another Deighton novel. But watched now, the strange third-act turn is a perfect retirement for Palmer.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He finally traces all the computerized orders to a concrete Oz in Texas. The closest thing in the series to a Bond villain\u2019s lair belongs to General Midwinter, a right-wing oil tycoon of vague military background who hasn\u2019t crossed a border in 25 years, but still doesn\u2019t trust anybody on the other side. He only talks business over the roar of machine gun fire. In disturbing montage, Midwinter screams about the saving graces of capitalism as portraits of Communist leaders shrivel away in a bonfire and his giddy followers square-dance the night away beneath bronze eagles holding the company logo, a Swastika with two broken arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ipcress File <\/em>is about war as it could\u2019ve been. Funeral in Berlin <\/em>is about war as it was, circa 1966. Billion Dollar Brain <\/em>is about war as it soon would be, forever and ever, amen.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The series ends as it begins, with Harry Palmer standing in front of his boss, staring into his bureaucratic death mask, and asking for a raise. His odds do not improve. At least some things never change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Palmer\u2019s personal file reads like a permanent record: \u201cInsubordinate, insolent, a trickster…perhaps with criminal tendencies.\u201d When his new boss, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":14560,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22767,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions\/22767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}