By Digby Warde-Aldam
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I’ve been watching a lot of crap recently. I’m in a strange sort of limbo at the moment, living on what is effectively a building site; my viewing habits have gone to seed. Being an unimaginative and lazy individual, my normal post college/work routine usually takes in two to three hours of internet TV or film per night, an allowance which cannot help but affect my disposition. Naturally when one fills up their time with tertiary material of such dizzying artistic merit as Masterchef and Celebrity Come Dine with me, there begins a slow descent into a state of zombification.
This isn’t to say I’m not enjoying my low-brow bingeing. I must have watched the opening scenes of the Guns of Navarone (possibly the greatest film about repressed homosexuality ever to have been subject to a twat like me writing something about it) about six hundred times since the end of August, and with each repeat viewing, the patriotic tear swelling in the corner of my eye becomes more and more jingoistic. There have been several instances where I have trawled the bowels of my DVD collection in search of long-forgotten gems, hidden amidst the horrific backlog of shit that really needs to be got rid of.
However, I have made one rediscovery that almost makes the hours of watching sub-standard thrillers, war movies and rom-coms (the shit that needs to go) bearable. This cinematic salvation comes in the form of the original Harry Palmer trilogy, or to be more accurate, the first two parts of it. The films themselves, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were the first three instalments of a series conceived by producer Harry Saltzman as “the thinking man’s answer to James Bond”, with some strong emphasis placed on the first part of that phrase. Spy thrillers they may be but both Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin require an unusual amount of involvement on the part of the viewer. Explosions, gadgets and supervillains simply do not figure, and Palmer, the reluctant antihero of the series (played by a post-Alfie Michael Caine) is more interested in buying tinned mushrooms than the shadowy world of international espionage. Unlike Bond, or almost any other action hero you’d care to mention, Palmer is a genuinely likeable figure, as confused and repulsed by the hypocrisy and double-dealing of his line of work as the viewer. Bespectacled and unglamorous, his only secret weapon is his perceived ignorance.
I had a lecturer once who claimed to only watch films set in places he knew. I imagine sticking to this, unless one happened to have an extraordinary knowledge of Los Angeles and New York, would be a rather restrictive and thankless task. However, in a funny way, I can see his point. Tracing Harry Palmer’s route around London is a lot of fun. Whether the undoubtedly great cinematography or an urban facelift are responsible I don’t know, but the familiar city is rendered almost completely alien. Kensington’s buildings are blackened, skeletal and resolutely Victorian, while Shoreditch may as well have been a battlefield, such is its squalor and eeriness. Similarly (and perhaps more understandably, this writer having been born not long before the wall came down), Funeral in Berlin’s juxtaposition of the titular city’s enforced no-man’s against its quasi-American shopping precinct the KuDamm, could not have presented a more unfamiliar picture of the city today had it been set in Beijing or Lagos.
I love these films as entertainment, but what really gets me is what I suppose should be referred to as “period detail”; the films are, to paraphrase John Cooper Clarke, a sociologist’s paradise. We see how shit life on a middling wage was in the 1960s (Palmer complains repeatedly about his salary, and is more than willing to make a buck or two on the side), and how the old order of the British establishment, represented by Palmer’s bosses had failed to come to terms with minor-power status, and the hilarious mediocrity of what passed for luxury circa 1966. It’s all a bit like laughing at your parents struggling with modern technology.
After Funeral in Berlin, the series lost its footing in the real world, and the final instalment, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain (directed, weirdly, by a sleepwalking Ken Russell), is an Austen Powers movie in all but name. The film, more plot driven than its predecessors is fun, but ultimately shit. It’s every bit as far-fetched as the Bond movies that the franchise had been supposed to act as a foil to. After this wet fart of a finale, Caine and Saltzman (and indeed, the rest of the world) lost interest, and Harry Palmer was put to sleep.
Recently, though, Michael Caine has talked about resurrecting the character for one last blast of speccy triumph. Should this happen, let’s hope he’s evolved into a cantankerous OAP living in the suburbs rather than the director of MI6 or something- I’d feel slightly betrayed if he was anything other than average.
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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.
