It was going to be a lovely funeral. Harry ‘Ipcress File’ Palmer just hoped it wouldn’t be his …
Colonel Stok, a Soviet intelligence officer responsible for security at the Berlin Wall, appears to want to defect but the evidence is contradictory. Stok wants the British to handle his defection and asks for one of their agents, Harry Palmer, to smuggle him out of East Germany.
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Michael Caine reprises his role as the rather curmudgeonly, stoic, "Harry Palmer" in this rather lacklustre tale of Cold War espionage. He is given the task of travelling to East Berlin to help facilitate the defection of "Col. Stok" (the scene-stealing Oskar Homolka), who has for years been in charge of stopping folks escaping from the East heading West - but with increasingly limited success! Pretty quickly, "Palmer" smells a rat. Well, actually, he smells a whole sewer of them and has no idea whom to trust as this really rather pedestrian story plods along. Caine is fine, but we see too little of Homolka and the rest of the cast add very little to this really un-menacing thriller. The infamous Berlin Wall seems to offer very little by way of impediment to anyone's movements around the city, and the longer the film went on the less I really bothered about the fairly obvious outcome. It's really only a film for fans of the star, this - and is simply not a patch on the "Ipcress File" (1965).
This almost shocked me. I have watched this film a number of times over the years, and really considered it a somewhat poorer sequel to the exploits of Harry Palmer as first seen in The Ipcress File. Well, I watched it again one day after when I was well rested (and a little bit bored). The thing is that I was concentrating on every little event or nuance that I was picking up. And lo and behold a whole new level of intrigue emerged. I had only ever previously glossed over the surface, picking up the salient features of the plot. But the deeper layer is sooo much more interesting. You need to take your time and look for it though. Start considering the motivations behind the things people say and do, and whether you are quite sure who was behind them, and who was working for who at the time. There are a lot of unstated goings on under the surface that explain seemingly small details that actually give the game away if you stop to think about them. Of course, if you are super bright and really on the ball, you may pick up this deeper level of intrigue at first viewing. Sadly I did not; - or is that happily, since when I did eventually pick it up it was like watching a whole new (and far more satisfying) movie.
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