I was trying to think of movies that have done a good job dealing with brainwashing or hypnosis. Alas, the one thing they couldn’t really change, because it’s so central it gives us the title, is the brainwashing stuff. That opening scene of the kidnapping where the different man appears in the train carriage is totally new. What they’ve added, however, are lots of great movie touches. The film version of The Ipcress File is a very free adaptation of the book, getting rid of all of the stuff in the South Pacific where the Americans are testing a neutron bomb. The action scenes in his books don’t play like movie scenarios, and indeed at times they can be hard to follow. Deighton wasn’t that great at movie writing. I think I know what some of the problem was. After a run of successful novels (four) and movies (three) in the 1960s Palmer made one more appearance in the mid ’70s ( Spy Story) and a couple of TV movies (not written by Deighton) in the mid ’90s. But, for better or for worse, Bond became the franchise hero while Deighton’s protagonist is largely unknown. I’d rather go back and read him than all but one or two of the Bond novels any day. He uses words like “azoic” and “horrisonous” just for kicks. Deighton is much better: funny, clever, intelligent, and even at times a bit adventurous. The thing is, Ian Fleming was a terrible writer. I can’t remember who it was that said bad books make good movies, but when considering the spy genre it does have the ring of truth. Enter Len Deighton and his tetralogy of spy novels, three of which were made into movies with Michael Caine as the British spy Harry Palmer (a nom de scène in the books he’s unnamed). He would profit from both the disease and its cure. That Harry Saltzman, who produced the early Bond films, would also produce The Ipcress File was perfectly apt. Why not make espionage less glamorous, more realistic, grubby, even mundane? Why not add in some darkness and moral ambiguity? Thus was born Bond redux. In the case of the Cold War spy story in the wake of Bondmania though there was an alternative path, which was correction.
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