The Ipcress File is one of the great 1960s Cold War spy thrillers and its follow-up, Funeral in Berlin, attempts to do the whole thing again. Popular opinion puts the sequel as second best to Ipcress – something its star Michael Caine seems to agree with in various interviews (like this one) – with the third in the series, Billion Dollar Brain, trailing along at the back.
The fun in The Ipcress File was in watching a man who was not a spy – and possibly wasn’t suited to becoming a secret agent – being turned into one in spite of himself, all part of a bigger plot to flush out a double agent working at the highest level of the Secret Service.
That cannot be done again, and writer Len Deighton and director Guy Hamilton don’t bother trying. Though only a year has past since The Ipcress File had come out, Funeral in Berlin seems to take place some years later. Harry Palmer is now a seasoned operative who knows his way around East and West Berlin, knows who all the major players are and has no trouble at all setting up a complex plot to get a high-ranking Soviet general to defect.
As in The Ipcress File, most of the opening positions are feints, ruses, gambits. The Russian general probably doesn’t want to defect, in much the same way that the pretty young woman, Samantha Steel, who befriends Palmer probably isn’t just a lonely model on her own in Berlin. And Palmer’s German go-between, Johnny Vulkan, probably isn’t who he says he is either.
Behind the ostensible plot a more shadowy one involving Nazi war criminals and Jewish money looted during the war and now safely stashed in Switzerland.
The Ipcress File was a deliberate “anti-Bond” movie, with the bespectacled, working-class Palmer the anti-007. He cooked! (as did Len Deighton, who for a while wrote recipes in a cartoon-strip format for British newspapers).
Some of that flavour is lost this time around. Palmer is still chippy – the word “insubordinate” is used in the first scene – but there’s no attempt to present him as a rookie.
Apart from watching Caine’s performance, the main reason to visit now is to bask in the Cold War ambience – East Berlin still ravaged by wartime bombing; West Berlin clearly on the up. There are men in trenchcoats following each other down dark streets, assignations in shady cabaret bars, plenty of glimpses of signs saying “You are leaving the American sector” and double agents. Lots of them.
Apart from Caine, there are returnees Guy Doleman as Palmer’s supercilious boss and Freda Bamford, cigarette perma-hanging from her lips, as a kind of anti-Miss Moneypenny. Paul Hubschmid plays Palmer’s duplicitous contact in Berlin, while Oscar Homolka is everyone’s idea of a Soviet general and Eva Renzi is the model Palmer meets. Renzi spent the shoot sabotaging her own career by irritating everyone on set, apparently, but on screen comes across exactly as she’s meant to – bright, capable and sexy.
Occasionally Guy Hamilton gives us a canted angle to remind us of Ipcress‘s more expressionistic take on the spy drama by its (underrated) director Sidney J Furie, but the real hole in this film is where John Barry’s score might have been. Instead of Barry’s hooky, offbeat score acting as a homage of sorts to The Third Man (unusual instrumentation, the main theme used as punctuation), there’s a more militaristic one by Konrad Elfers. It’s good, in a spy thriller kind of way, but lacks the distinctiveness that made Barry’s score so integral to the success of Ipcress.
In spite of the fact that Harry Palmer is cool and competent, has an eye for the ladies and is a master of the dry quip, Caine’s performance keeps Palmer away from any obvious comparison with James Bond. Remarkable when you consider that Bond production designer Ken Adam is in charge of the look (mid-century modern), director Hamilton had already directed one Bond movie at this point, Goldfinger, and would go on to direct three more. And that the crew, and the producer, Harry Saltzman, are all Bond guys too.
It’s not Bond, not by a stretch, and it’s not The Ipcress File either. But if you loved The Ipcress File and need a bit more of its downbeat 1960s Cold War glam, it’s not a bad place to go.
Funeral in Berlin – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
