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The Ipcress File [Blu-ray] [1965] | ![The Ipcress File [Blu-ray] [1965]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VfiIfZOjL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Sidney J. Furie
Actors: Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd
Studio: ITV DVD
Category: DVD
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £9.98
You Save: £10.01 (50%)
New (4) from £9.98
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1061
Format: Colour, Import, Pal
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Media: Blu-ray
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 107
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 5.1 x 0.5
EAN: 5037115293138
ASIN: B001DOM03C
Theatrical Release Date: 1965
Release Date: November 10, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk
'Michael Caine cuts a cool dash as the sceptical, working-class secret service man Harry Palmer. The film is stylistically extravagant, slyly anti-American and pays homage to classic movies'--Philip French This espionage thriller represents a landmark in spy movies, jettisoning the excesses of 007 and introducing the sly, dry intelligence agent Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine, relishing a role that marked him for stardom. The story, based on Len Deighton's novel, centres on Palmer's investigation into British Intelligence security. He's soon enmeshed in a world of double-dealing, kidnap and murder and finds a traitor is operating at the heart of the secret service. Will the mysterious `Ipcress File' reveal who the traitor is? Produced by Harry Saltzman (the early Bond movies) and with an evocative score by Academy Award winning John Barry, The Ipcress File emerges as one of cinema's wittiest and grittiest thrillers.
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| Customer Reviews:
 when spies were real spies August 20, 2008
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
Classic cold war spy film of the mid sixties when Michael Caine was at his best. Harry Palmer (i.e. M. Caine) is a rebellious spy in the British secret service who ends up being used as a pawn by the powers that be. Double cross, brainwashing and some cool music from John Barry make this the best of its genre.
 the spy who came in from Stella Street November 17, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
My favourite film of all time, and for 1 hour and 50 minutes this is a great way to forget you are living in the 21st century heading for hell in a handbasket.
Yes, but this blu-ray edition only slightly improves on the Network dvd. It looks like it's taken from the same print, and I doubt it comes from an original negative. Some researcher should look in the Pinewood vaults to see if an original negative of this amazing film exists - and transfer it while it's still intact.
The only extras are a British trailer and a good photo gallery. So unless this is your best film of all time too, may as well stay with your dvd special edition if you have it.
For the uninitiated: what's so good about it?
The director set fire to the script on Day 1, he felt it was so cliched and pedestrian. So he decided to make every shot in the picture LOOK interesting as compensation for the dialogue and plot.
The Ipcress FIle is considered one of the finest uses of wide scope ever made. The invention of what to do with that wide, wide screen is astonishing - not just from one scene to the next, but from one frame to another.
Often the set-up is so frivolous it feels like a pun, zooming through a keyhole, hanging from an overhead light fitting looking straight down, observing a fight on the steps of the Albert Hall from inside a telephone box. Sidney Furie's directing and Otto Heller's camerawork are audacious. We eavesdrop over the shoulder of one spy to look at another spy, over a tweed collar and shoulder that extends across the length of the screen watched by a '60s audience that had just seen David Lean cover the same dimensions with the Sahara desert.
Saltsman the producer saw the rushes of the fight scene photographed largely from inside a phone box whose window frames obscure our vision, and scored by the strangest excuse for rough-house music that John Barry ever devised - and Saltsman went ape. Is this any way to shoot a fight scene in the era of James Bond?
Yes, it is, because spy Harry Palmer, deadbeat and poorly paid and matter of fact, debunks the myth of Bond, and so does the director. Since the script was pedestrian, the film stylises the pedestrian. Most spy activity is waiting around, Furie said, yet you don't see much waiting around in spy movies. You do in The Ipcress File. But when every set-up is this stylised and every bar of music is this distinctive, waiting is a joy to watch.
Ken Adam designed the sets more modestly than the Bond series. Saltsman had Bond ideas about putting computers in the London office of a secret service Major, and Adam talked him out of it. It was a real London location whose sparse, Edwardian office with its fireplace and high ceiling reflected an old-fashioned British Secert Service and highlighted one feature of the room: the high, high windows and door all the way up to that ceiling. The ceiling of that room remains nationalised to this day.
Michael Caine is so definitively Harry Palmer that Len Deighton's book might have been written with Caine in mind. It wasn't, but when Caine read the novel, he had himself in mind from cover to cover. He knew the deadpan, working class delivery and world view of Palmer was right up his street.
Watch out for the superb supporting cast - great British character acting, with that quaint way of making the banal eccentric. Nigel Green and Guy Dollman, at one and the same time, play stereotypes who are yet fully formed, compelling and believable characters, and I still don't know how they did it. Gordon Jackson is beautifully measured as Palmer's colleague. And Sue Lloyd can purr and pout at the same time. Sue Lloyd knows how to cross her legs and make it look like an action scene.
Look verry closely, if you care to ignore the recession for a while, and you'll see 3 discrepancies in the looped dialogue, where the voice-overs revise what the lips mouthe. Nigel Green talks about a spy who seems to come from Alabama, as near as I can tell from his lips, but his voice says Albania and the discrepancy shows - at least it shows to an enthusiast who loves every second of this film. And then Michael Caine tells his boss there is a dead Yankee spy in his flat: his dubbed voice changes that to a dead American agent. And finally, Caine says goodbye to Sue Lloyd...but his lips say 'taraa'...which Americans might think is a codeword, I guess, so out went the colloquialism in the dubbing.
Actually the dialogue has a tongue in cheek charm about it, parodying English propriety as well as the spy genre, at that
precise moment in '60s cinema where the spy film was becoming the spy spoof because everyone was so hip to the genre conventions that the only way left to go was to send it up.
The '60s London locations - exteriors and interiors - are a nostalgic delight. High ceilings and vaccuous rooms and long corridors of British Intelligence remind me fondly of what nationalization does to organizations. And there is a file and a file number for every procedure because nationalization makes even spying civilized. Do you have T11 authority for that? Is that my B101?
Watch for the gorgeous framing when Green takes a phone call from Caine - Green's face is pushed to the far left of the screen and a lit red lampshade takes up three quarters of the frame, close up, across and from top to bottom: the glowing band of scarlet becomes abstract colour without form. How wonderful, when film-makers treat the medium as an art form.
You'll see so many artful and whimsical shots like that, you may purr just like Sue Lloyd.
Iconic 60's classic gets a picture-perfect, if extras-light Hi-Def debut November 20, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I'm sure that most people reading this will be fairly familiar with this terrific film, and will mostly want to know how this Hi-Def debut compares to the previous DVD versions. So, to business...
First and foremost, the film is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio and is 16:9 enhanced. Whilst I can't speak for the recent Network DVD re-issue, comparing it to the old widescreen Carlton DVD the difference in quality is remarkable.
Detail is infinitely improved with much more fine texture being visible (especially on people's skin). Contrast is accurately reproduced, with no discernible clipping of the white areas of the image, and a decent enough if slightly limited range of detail in the darker areas (although this may just be my TV).
Colors are much more accurate than the previous DVD (on which the overall image, and skin tones in particular, suffered from a queasy yellow tint). On this release, skin tones are accurate and natural, and the overall image reproduces the photographic style of the film perfectly.
One of the most striking differences is how much less dirt and grain are apparent in the image (for an example, look at the interior shot from the car driving through the station entrance at the beginning of the film). Whether this is the natural result of using a better film element or through artificial grain and noise reduction I am not sure, but I certainly did not detect any unsightly digital smearing or other artefacts (including, thankfully, edge enhancement).
I have certainly never seen this film look better, and would definitely recommend it to those looking for an upgrade over their old copy. As far as the Network release is concerned, I remember reading about some sync issues that people were complaining about. Those certainly are not in evidence here.
Sound-wise, the track provided here is of excellent quality with a full dynamic range and excellent clarity. I can't really review the 5.1 remix as I don't have a surround sound set up, although quite what they could (or should) do with a strictly mono film is questionable.
What is a pity is that ITV chose not to import the special features from the recent Network release onto this blu-ray, which is pretty bare. However, the very favorable asking price on amazon goes some way towards mediating this.
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