gervase_fen | Recently watched : Harry Palmer Trilogy

The Ipcress File, shown on BBC4 as part of the Music of Cinema season, cast its spell on me once again, so I also watched Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain for, I think, the first time.

There's so much I enjoy about Ipcress - some of which I think is rooted in my childhood reading of Target novelisations, specifically The Green Death and The Dinosaur Invasion. BOSS' calming 'chats' with Stevens read like an homage, and the Reminder Room (and its real location) pay tribute to one of the later twists of the movie. The agents having to fill in requisitions and chits (a gag that comes back in the subsequent movies) also feels to me like Pertwee-era UNIT. And of course there's the glorious music, Len Deighton's hands making the perfect omelette, Caine's chippy insouciance, the one-stop-from-Avengerland facade of the secret service, Guy Doleman grumping around a supermarket...

Funeral in Berlin picks up on Palmer's colourful past (plucked out of jail in Germany post-war to join the service) by exploiting his network of criminal contacts (there's a nicely exasperated German police chief hoping Palmer will leave his patch.) This is a pretty engrossing espionage caper, and I enjoyed it a great deal. Caine is excellent as the ex-con thinking on his feet, trying to stay two steps ahead of his Secret Service masters and the opposition - there are two stand out scenes in which he's ordered to kill a target by his boss, and then confronts said target with his predicament. Gunter Meisner, a sinister face from The Quller Memorandum, makes the most of his short screen time. And Hugh Burden is a revelation.

Sadly it all falls apart with Billion Dollar Brain - after some early, enjoyable sequences of Palmer being virtually dumped in Finland and ordered to get on with it, the film just happens to Palmer (I stopped counting how many times Palmer was hit over head and rendered unconscious so the plot could inch forward a bit more.) Ken Russell lets rip with the visual pizzazz in the last third of the movie, and Ed Begley as the radical anti-Communist Texan billionaire owner of the computer brain chews the scenery (possibly lots of jabolite in the ice-field finale.)