They'll Be Gone Soon
It has few pretensions. The film is a spy thriller dressed up in Sixties cool; the
camera part of the smart clothes it wears. The opening scene is its window display: Palmer wakes up to
find his bed empty, and the room all a blur - his woman has left and his
glasses are on the bedside table.
In a more serious film this would be the start of a prolonged
exploration, both of cinematic imagery and the metaphors of distorted vision
(psychological, political, and social).
Here it is simply decoration.
Later we see many more of these baubles and tinsel: one scene shot through
the back of a chair; another with half the screen divided by metal doors, yet another distorted by double vision…
It is the influence, I would guess, of the Nouvelle Vague, translated into a commercial entertainment: so
light are the use of these techniques you could almost miss them; and I
imagine most of the audience does, concentrating instead on the intricacies of
the complex plot; which says something about the insecurities of the times.
There is a brain drain, with British scientists either
leaving the country or suddenly losing their creativity: some of them dry up,
almost over night. Radcliffe, a
top physicist, and seemingly healthy after his recent captivity, is suddenly
unable to remember his groundbreaking work when he stands up to give a lecture
– he appears to have been brain washed.
A sinister figure, code name Bluejay, a naturalised Albanian, is
suspected of kidnapping scientists in order to sell them on the black market. Later we discover he de-programmes the
boffins through psychological conditioning. Like the influence of the Nouvelle Vague the science is another kind of decoration, here
picking up the popular fears of Skinnerian Behaviourism,[i] Vance
Packard’s subliminal advertising, and William
M. Whyte’s corporate profiling, to create a plot reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, but with a significant difference: the Cold War
theme is fused with one about big business. Two fears are merged into a single national threat; while
the involvement of the CIA suggests the anxieties of a Britain falling
increasingly under the influence of the United States. [ii]
It has lots of style.
Caine is perfect. His role
fits the times like a bespoke suit: a lower class trickster who is useful for
the establishment; and whose history of petty crime appears moral when compared
to the machinations of his superiors. Harry Palmer is very human. He hates bureaucracy, but is
sympathetic to individual people; and is obsessed with “birds”, which actually
softens him - he likes women, and seems positively affected by them. His superiors are not so gentle. They are all army men, and treat the
world as a game, and the people in it as things. It is a fair summation of the careless inhumanity of a government
department or a corporate management team.
The
Ipcress File is the revolt of the
little man against the big bureaucracies; and who can resist even the most
sophisticated of conditioning, providing he fights for his freedom, and endures
the pain that it will cause. The film has
all the optimism of the early Sixties when the establishment looked ready to
fall.
[ii] This is rather jokingly brought out in a scene in an
“American supermarket”, where Palmer and his old boss Ross have a
conversation. It is something of a
shock to realise that something so ubiquitous as the local supermarket is a
comparatively recent American invention.
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