THE IPCRESS FILE (2022)

The insatiable maw of streaming services has recently glommed onto various iconic star-making suspense films of the 1960s & ‘70s.   Movies one might have thought untouchable.  What young British actor (and they’re always Brits) would want to risk their RIPLEY against Alain Delon's in PURPLE NOON/’60?  Compete with Edward Fox’s JACKAL/’73?  Or take on Michael Caine in THE IPCRESS FILE?*  Yet this is the one that sparks on all cylinders, indeed, a big improvement from the Caine/Sidney J. Furie 1965 original.  (Caine great; director Furie a hack.)  For a change, its six episodes never feel padded, scripter John Hodge able to top off the tank entirely from the Len Deighton novel.  With Joe Cole bringing skinny, but steel-tested strength to the film’s making-of-Harry Palmer-spy concept.  (The famous black glass frames slightly thinner than Caine’s.)  The same Cold War setting, now opening with some backstory on how Palmer’s Berlin blackmarket past sent him to jail; and the subsequent spy-in-training deal that got him released.  Turns out, he’s a natural at the game and soon has a major assignment concurrent with a JFK visit to the U.K. while international nuclear scuttlebutt plays out in the plot’s foreground.  (No surprise, the two events merge toward the climax.)  I’d forgotten how much is lifted from THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (published ‘59; film ‘62), but it works just as well here.  Great support from a lesser known cast (only Tom Hollander's spy boss a familiar face*), but all spot on under James Watkins unusually site specific direction.  This IPCRESS a paradigm of a streaming remake.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DB:  The ‘65 IPCRESS worth it for early Caine (those gourmet cans of fish, now quite ‘in’).  So too both RIPLEYs, though René Clément’s PURPLE NOON makes author Patricia Highsmith a moralist, while even a very chilly Andrew Scott as Ripley in the remake is unable to make eight episodes seem necessary.  As for DAY OF THE JACKAL, the Fred Zinnemann original is the one truly great film of the bunch while the Eddie Redmayne rethink thought it a good idea to make him a family man.  Yikes!  (Check ‘em out using our Search Engine.  Upper Left-hand corner on the main site.  E-phone users scroll down to find the Web Version link.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Palmer works for Hollander who runs an MI6 offshoot.  Think SLOW HORSES but staffed with high achievers rather than disgraced also-rans.