Word: ipcress
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...Collection, one of the quieter works of a very noisy playwright, and after an hour or so moves to a mime by Samuel Beckett (titled, with cheery deadpan, Act Without Words I). Illuminations, a festival of electronic echoes and throbbing lights reminiscent of the best parts of The Ipcress File, brings down the curtain...
...mouth existence led by unshaven forty-pounds-a-month British counter-intelligence persons appears to have awakened yet another romantic streak in the masses. The first of the new breed was Martin Ritt's deliberately ugly adaptation of Spy Who Came in from the Cold; there followed The Ipcress File (which might be termed a transitional product), and now The Deadly A flair, The Quiller Memorandum, and Funeral in Berlin...
...Pinter wrote The Quiller Memorandum, easily the best of the lot. But more recently the Bond hacks have begun to get their hands in to the new field. Guy Hamilton, a hack if ever there was one, has directed Funeral in Berlin, a clumsy, convoluted, illegitimate offspring of The Ipcress File in which agent Harry Palmer, again played by Michael Caine, proves a powerful bore. The direction is admittedly undistinguished, but the script to Funeral really takes the cake: the spy sets out to get an East German big-wig out of East Berlin; naturally the unsuspecting audience assumes this...
...film (aside from Sellers) are John Mills and Ralph Richardson as the brothers but they are given little enough to do. Most of the action is centered around miscast, awkward, misty-eyed Michael Caine whose guardian is one of the brothers (you may have liked him in The Ipcress File but wait till you see him now) and his courtship with an orphan whose guardian is the other surviving brother. In an eminently forgettable role, she is a caricature of supposed Victorian modesty (her cousin's hobby of collecting eggs is deemed "obscene" and she practically faints when Caine...
...Ipcress File) Furie's oblique camera work, which teases the eye into viewing dangerously grinning Mexicans and other signs of violence from what seem to be safe, shadowy hiding places in the immediate vicinity. Unhappily, it proves to be a mirage effect that lures an audience on and on, through dusty mesas and vaporous characterizations, toward nothing in particular...