One person not on the guest list yet, but who will surely crash the party even if he’s not, is that wonderful actor Peter Wyngarde. David, over at Permission to Kill, is in the midst of a Peter Wyngarde festival. He requested other COBRAS members to provide thoughts on Wyngarde, and I offered the following bit of artwork (which I need to recolor — I used a black and white photo for reference, and now need to make his scarf orange instead of blue!):
Peter Wyngarde as Number Two
David has amassed quite an appreciation of Wyngarde, and it’s currently ongoing, so check back for more. So far, he’s covered the following:
“Terse, sardonic, and knowing, Free Agent is a take-no-prisoners exploration of loyalty, duplicity and love. I dare anyone to put this book down after reading the first electrifying chapter.” —Eric Van Lustbader, author of The Ninja and The Bourne Sanction
“An authentic espionage novel with accurate tradecraft and intelligence operatives who act with intelligence. If you like vintage John le Carre, you’ll love Free Agent. Set in the Cold War, packed with history and tension, it’s a must-read for any true spy-novel fan.” —David Morrell, author of First Blood and The Brotherhood of the Rose
If you’ve just asked yourself, “Hey, First Blood like Rambo?” The answer is yes.
ITEM!
Tanner at the Double O Section has been a monster of DVD reviews lately! There are so many that I don’t know where to start — Mission Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, Return of the Man From UNCLE…just go visit the blog!
He’s also been giving information about the latest OSS-117 film. I saw the first of the parody films, and enjoyed it immensely. Much better than Austin Powers, and much more in line with something like No One Lives Forever. Tanner will be seeing the film at an LA screening soon, and we look forward to his review!
ITEM!
Bombard your local library with requests for Wes Britton’s latest book! Give them the information below:
The Encyclopedia of TV Spies
By Wesley Britton
Format: softcover
Pages: 520
ISBN: 1-59393-325-8
Price: $29.95
Publisher: Bear Manor Media
ITEM!
Don’t forget about our ongoing Nick Fury competition. We currently have only four entries and five prizes to give away!
ITEM!
Mister 8, the comic, will resume updates again soon!
Semester: complete. Grades: all A’s. Let us now resume our talk of secret agents with some fantastic news!
On behalf of David, Jason, Matthew, Paul, and Wes, I hope you’ll all join me in welcoming the newest member of the COBRAS:
Agent NAJA NAJA:
Spy-Fi Channel is the latest blog exploring genre fiction by celebrated comics scribe Christopher Mills. I’ve long been a fan of Mills, from the first time I read Gravedigger, a hardboiled graphic novel with art by Rick Burchett that channels Donald E. Westlake’s classic character Parker (especially as portrayed by Lee Marvin in Point Blank). With his newest blog, he’s come out of the corner swinging, with looks at classic Eurospy flicks, rare spy television shows, and much-maligned Bond films.
Christopher has also graced us with a look at a (so far) unpublished comic, with art by Rick Hoberg and Matt Webb that references both On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man series. I expect more fantastic stuff from him in the future, both in terms of blog posts and comics work (he also publishes Femme Noir, with art by former Michael Mauser illustrator Joe Staton, and is working on a Kolchak: The Night Stalker series for Moonstone). We’re pleased as punch to have Christopher aboard.
Later on tonight, expect a few more posts from me, including the long overdue results of our Nick Fury contest, and information about other fabulous prizes currently up for grabs.
We’re happy to announce the winners of our first contest here at Mister 8! These were our top five entries that answered the question (spinning out of Costumed Adventurers Week): “Who is your favorite superhero-spy, and why?”
In the end, I’ve decided that everyone will get the full range of prizes! Which means that the following five folks will soon have a package arriving at their doors containing:
A Nick Fury sketch by yours truly
A S.H.I.E.L.D. logo Marvel Comics promotional magnet
A poster from Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas
I’ll be working on the drawings over the next few weeks and will share them here when they’re finished! Thanks to all that entered, and if you didn’t win this time, stay tuned — we’ll have another contest soon!
1st Place: Jason Selinger
The first thing I’d ask in response to the question at hand is, what constitutes a superhero? If Batman is a superhero, then is not James Bond pretty much one as well? Whereas Batman has his utility belt and batarangs, 007 carries a variety of hidden gadgets created by Q-Branch. Whereas Batman wears a scary bat suit, Bond has his costumes as well: a tuxedo, or a scuba suit with a duck hat, depending on the situation.
If being a comic character is the defining feature, then what about Tara Chace (my favorite comic book spy)? She’s much more authentic than even the most recent Bond films that have been praised for their realism.
Hopefully, you’ll consider this more “food for thought” than “devil’s advocate.” If it matters, I also like Nick Fury, so I wouldn’t mind winning a sketch!
2nd Place: Ed Barker
The best superhero spies have to be The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, by far. They serve as a fine legacy to the career of Wally Wood, who I agree with you, is one of the most underrated artists of the silver age of comics. No other book successfully unites the two crazes of the era, spies (like The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) and superheroes (Batman, both in comics and on television) like T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. The death of Menthor remains one of the most interesting and lasting comic book deaths.
3rd Place: Derrick (no last name given)
My favorite superhero spy is Nick Fury, and it has much to do with the work that Steranko did on the book and in how he elevated the artform of comics. Steranko was a bridge between Kirby and the rest of the world of pop culture, and his run on Nick Fury still holds up well today, in my opinion.
4th Place: Stormer
Mine is Nick Fury, and always has been, ever since I was little. I had Marvel Universe cards and I showed my dad, and he told me, “Hey that’s Nick Fury,” and told me the history. Then I went to the comic book shop and found a bunch for 5 dollars and read then and found out that really, he may not have powers, but he linked to nearly all of the Marvel Universe and was an important character in the old comics. He even mentions Man from UNCLE and James Bond, and has a secret entrance in a barber shop, kind of like Man From UNCLE has Del Floria’s. And let’s not forget the Helicarrier, and his flying car, and needle gun — he is the ultimate spy in comics plus he’s huge in comics now. That’s why I like him.
5th Place: Ned Kelly
I don’t know if you would class him as a spy, but I am kind of fond of Flash Gordon. He’s an innocent bystander who gets drawn into a battle with a guy who wants to take over the world – like a spy villain.
Fellow COBRAS agent Jason Whiton at Spy Vibe is giving away bushels of prizes in honor of his birthday. Seems a bit backwards, but you get to benefit! All you have to do is leave a answer to questions in the following blog posts to win the prizes offered:
We COBRAS had a ton of fun with the Costumed Adventurer Month last month (or was it the month before?), and so have been planning another team-up behind the scenes. This week at all of the COBRAS sites (a handy list of which is available in the footer of this very website), we’ll be looking at spies versus dangerous Cold War era technology — killer cybernauts, fembots, super computers, and more!
For our first Man v. Machine post here at Mister 8, I wanted to look at one of my all-time favorite cartoons. Johnny Quest may not have been a spy show, strictly speaking, but it’s definitely a product of the Cold War spy era. Writers Timothy and Kevin Burke hit the nail on the head when they describe the series in their book, Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture:
For us, the original Quest episodes, which began appearing in prime time in 1964, are as perfect a distillation of their time as the early James Bond films, a luscious cocktail of technophilia, blithe masculinity, and charmingly innocent cold war ethnocentrism. Like James Bond, the Quest team lived off of a regular diet of evil Oriental masterminds, vaguely East Bloc no-goodniks, various supersecret gadgets, and manly derring-do, though they didn’t indulge in women, martinis, or caviar.
Particularly Bond-like is the bodyguard Roger T. “Race” Bannon, an agent from Intelligence One sent to protect the scientist Dr. Benton Quest and his inventions, lest they fall into enemy hands. In fact, according to Quest creator and artist Doug Wildey, Joe Barbera wanted to specifically draw on the James Bond series to set the tone of the series:
The Barbera influence was felt there because he had gone to see a movie called Dr. No and wanted to get in stuff like “007″– numbers. Which we included, by the way, in the first Jonny Quest. It was called “Jonny Quest File 037″ or something. We dropped that later; it didn’t work. But that was his father’s code name as he worked for the government as a scientist and that kind of thing. That influence was felt.
Dr. Benton’s son Jonny, his friend Hadji, and the family dog Bandit were the real heroes of the show, which premiered in prime time (following the success of The Flintstones), but quickly transitioned to Saturday morning. If Jonny Quest indeed counts as an espionage show, I’m sorely tempted to call the theme song, by Hoyt Curtin, the greatest spy theme of all time (sorry, John Barry!). Often playing the Dr. No role for the series (appearing four times in the original series and returning for updates and movies) was the villainous Dr. Zin….
Because this is the Man v. Machine roundtable, we want to feature Dr. Zin’s most popular appearance, and certainly one of the best episodes of Jonny Quest: The Robot Spy. In the episode, Zin sends a new invention to spy on Quest headquarters, an invention that is one of the most recognizable robot characters ever on a Saturday morning cartoon show. Without further ado, The Robot Spy:
Jonny Quest was a high quality television show from a time when Hanna Barbera held high standards for the quality of their animation. If you’re interested in seeing other episodes (and I hope you are), Amazon carries The Complete First Season (quite inexpensively too, if you’re willing to take a used copy).
A memorable show is sure to spawn imitators and homages, and Jonny Quest led to one of the best: The Venture Brothers, soon to enter a fourth season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. In a second season episode called Fallen Arches, the robot spy makes an appearance as an invention of Dr. Rusty Venture, in a quite humorous send-up of comics, Quest, and Cool Hand Luke. Track it down!
We continue our look at secret agents taking on nefarious world-threatening technology today with a look at some powerful robots. But first, if you want to see what the other COBRAS have been discussing, Tanner @ Double-O-Section has just posted a great run down.
Peel and Steed encounter a Cybernaut
Today, we’ll be looking at something that inevitably the other COBRAS will be covering as well — the trenchcoat- and trilby-wearing metal automatons known as the Cybernauts! The bots made their first appearance in the October 1965 episode of The Avengers that was later the first one to be broadcast in the United States (in March 1966). The episode has proved to be popular on both sides of the pond, and many media critics cite it as an episode important to the thematic growth of the series.
James Chapman in Saints and avengers: British adventure series of the 1960s (2002) suggests that the episode presents an about-face to earlier views of technology seen on the program, and stemmed from growing fears of a society ruled by technology:
While resistance to progress is dangerous, so too is progress itself if it remains unchecked. Whereas earlier Avengers episodes had advocated investment in science and technology as the key to securing the nation’s future, the series now suggested that in the wrong hands they could be used for diabolical ends. Again, The Avengers can be seen as responding to contemporary concerns, particularly the ideas expressed by academics such as Theodore Roszak that technocracy (the organisation of society based on principles laid down by technical experts) could all too easily lead to a form of totalitarianism. The danger of technocracy taken to the extreme became a prominent theme of the ‘classic’ period of The Avengers.
Jeffrey S. Miller, writing in his Something completely different: British television and American culture (2000) builds on David Buxton’s view that The Cybernauts, and similarly themed episodes, reflected a British class struggle that was mostly lost on Americans:
Of those narrative conventions coming out of the Bond movies and other secret agent shows, none was more important, as “The Cybernauts” would indicate, than the menace of technology. David Buxton argues that The Avengers represents a discourse on the place of technology in accommodating modernity to the traditional British class structure. A danger when used by a nouveau riche class (including scientist / entrepreneurs such as Armstrong) without regard to a traditional elite, technology is equally problematic when used by aristocrats to defend the old order against the rising welfare state. The middle ground, he argues, is technology in the service of consumption and fashion, a middle ground American audiences already found themselves occupying, thanks to Bond, UNCLE, Drake, and other secret agents….The narrative deployment of technology as the tool of evil, familiar to American audiences not only through previous secret agent movies and television programs, but through their own fears of nuclear holocaust, became the central motif of Avengers plots, superseding the Cold War even in many episodes in which Cold War concerns were directly referenced.
Norbert Wiener
The use of the portmanteau term “cybernaut” appears to have originated with this episode, though later it was used by scientists in descriptions of potential robot-manned space flights, and more recently has come to mean anyone who explores digital space — the internet, virtual realities, MMORPGs, etc. The word draws its meaning from Norbert Wiener’s use of “cybernetics,” or technological mechanisms, in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society. Wiener would later go on to be a major influence on those who pioneered the field of robotics, but, fittingly, worried about the effect that robots might have on society — not because they’d go evil and run amok, but because they’d put people out of jobs. As he wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings, “The automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.” Wiener set forth ethical guidelines and ideas in his work that he hoped would guide inventors and developers of the future.
But what do mad scientists care of ethics? In their world, cybernauts are the economic equvalent of hitmen-for hire, as John Steed and Emma Peel soon discover. While investigating the murders of businessmen set to bid on a new kind of integrated circuit, the pair find themselves searching for someone who can walk through walls, crack down doors, and break necks with a single blow. Eventually, the trail leads to crazed wheelchair-bound inventor Dr. Armstrong, who is using the faceless steel strongbots to eliminate his competition (Wiener was right — early in the episode, Armstrong brags to Steed that he has no need for employees besides the cybernauts). To give you a taste, here’s a tension-filled clip from the finale of the episode (note the casual glance Emma gives as the cybernauts beat up on their creator):
Steed and Peel faced off against the Cybernauts again in a later episode, in which the mad scientist role was played by Hammer horror films veteran Peter Cushing. In the sequel, Cushing plays the brother of Dr. Armstrong, and uses a new wave of cybernauts to take revenge on Peel and Steed for his brother’s death:
But that wasn’t the end of the Cybernauts. They returned again, in an episode of The New Avengers, where Steed, Purdey and Gambit fight the robots sent on behalf of a former double agent, Kane, who blames them for his disfigurement. Kane teams up with the man who originally developed the cybernauts for Armstrong, and in the conclusion winds up becoming half cybernaut himself — a cyborgernaut, if you will:
The last of the cybernauts? Not hardly, though this marked their last time on television. John Peel and Dave Rogers revived the killer robots for his The Avengers: Too Many Targets, which found Steed teaming up with all of his former partners to take down a new cybernaut threat. In the book that, in his Spy Television, fellow COBRAS agent Wes Britton calls, “One of the most interesting literary incarnations of any secret agent venture,” The Avengers, all of them, are in Africa investigating the murder of two agents when judo punches start to resound with a familiar clang. Here’s a taste:
Steed stared down at the broken robot. “It’s familiar, wouldn’t you say?”
“Very,” Emma admitted, chilled. “It looks like a Cybernaut. But it can’t be.”
On his knee, Steed poked at the exposed circuits with the ferrule of his umbrella. “A new generation of Cybernauts,” he agreed. “Ones that look like people we know–and act like them. These are sophisticated, Mrs. Peel. Very sophisticated.”
Emma thought back to their previous two encounters with the Cybernauts. They had been cold, emotionless robots, built by the crippled Dr. Armstrong. Powerful, silent, and programmable, they had twice been turned against her and Steed. The first time had been by Amrstrong, and the second time by the late inventor’s brother, Paul Beresford. But Armstrong had died, killed accidentally by one of his own creations.
“How can they be?” she objected. “Armstrong was killed.” She didn’t like where Steed’s thoughts seemed to be heading.
“So were the Cybernauts,” Steed said softly. “But machines can’t die.”
The question I’ll leave you with is this: are the cybernauts badguys? Or are they just a reflection of the evil desires of their creators? Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the opposite — a cybernaut created by the forces of good.
Fiction, especially spy fiction, is rife with robots created by evil geniuses bent on world domination and/or destruction. Sometimes those robots are destroyed by superhero secret agents, but sometimes they miraculously develop a moral consciousness, turn on their creators, and choose to do good. Let’s take a look at a pair of those today!
The first is truly a “cybernaut,” a human-looking (specifically Dick Gauthier-looking) bot named Hymie, invented by Dr. Ratton and dispatched by KAOS to kill Maxwell Smart (of Get Smart, naturally). In the end, when Hymie’s creator calls him a monster, he short circuits and is able to overcome his programming and save the day:
Hymie became a full-fledged member of CONTROL, though he was sure to say that his first preference is IBM, which he thought would be a, “nice way to meet some intelligent machines.” I’m wondering if, since the Avengers episode that seems to have coined the term “cybernaut,” hadn’t aired in the U.S. yet, if the episode where Hymie first appears was the first time American audiences heard the word. I also wonder if the writers of Get Smart used the term independently of the Avengers?
Our next good guy robot is not from a secret agent television show, but, like Jonny Quest, exists in a world predicated on Cold War tensions. Even beating out the Pixar movies, which I adore, this is my favorite animated film of all time: The Iron Giant.
Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant was directed by Brad Bird, who later went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The film features a giant metal man who crash lands off the coast of Maine, and the young boy who teaches him about the important things in life: love, fun, Superman. A four-story tall robot is hard to hide, and so rumors begin to spread about the Giant. Those rumors are investigated by the U.S. Army, specifically Kent Mansley, who comes to see the Giant as a threat to the American way. Mansley, though the villain of the piece, does have a semi-valid point: the Iron Giant is a weapon, though with Hogarth’s help, he learns to suppress his violent programming.
If you haven’t seen this film, go out and find it. Playing the voice of the Giant is by far Vin Diesel’s best performance, and I still prefer this over Bird’s Pixar films. If you have seen it, perhaps you’ll enjoy revisiting the climax of the film:
Two questions to think about today:
1. Isn’t a robot that breaks programming, by it’s very nature, defective?
2. Is it wrong (speaking hypothetically) to build robots that do bad, or morally ambigious things, to give them self-awareness to realize this, and yet to not allow them to break their programming?
***
A few additional notes:
NOTE #1:
I play pub trivia every week with my wife and other students in my program. Our trivia czar is a swell guy, and each week, the winning team gets to choose a category for one of the rounds of the next week’s trivia. My team had won the week before, and so last night, we answered questions in a category of my choosing, “60s spy TV shows.” We aced the round. How would you have done?
1. Who was Maxwell Smart’s partner on Get Smart?
2. How many seconds does Jim Phelps have before the tape self-destructs?
3. What is the cover career of Alexander Scott and Kelly Robinson?
4. Why is KAOS located in Delaware?
5. If you referred to yourself as a Steedophile, you would be a fan of what show?
Bonus: For whom was Artimus Gordon a sidekick and master of disguise?
Unfortunately, we lost all of our points on a wager in the final round, so we didn’t get to pick the category for the following week. Maybe next time!
NOTE #2:
The next Man v. Machine post may be a little late, because I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night! Expect our week-long look at spies and technology to extend into the weekend, and perhaps even spill over into next week….
In a virtual version of that game we all used to play in grade school, where we strove to be the last person clapping after a round of applause, I’m one-upping Tanner@Double O Section’s tardiness with my own finale to Man v. Machine…week.
We’ve been talking extensively about robots so far, so let’s switch gears today and take a look at computers. I was originally going to cover a bevy of espionage films today to build my ideas around, but why bother? Why bother when a shining example has been provided by one of the greatest films, espionage, sci-fi, period, of all time: Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville.
Alphaville Poster, Art by Armstrong Sabian
Brief recap: In the futuristic titular city, journalist / secret agent Lemmy Caution arrives on a secret mission from the outlands — to capture Professor Von Braun, the creator of super computer Alpha 60, and to use his knowledge to take down the dictatorial machine. In Alphaville, Caution encounters automaton after automaton, people ruled by the cold logic of a computer that has outlawed love and poetry. In Alphaville, logic is order, and those who act illogically pay the price with their lives. Caution falls in love with Natasha, Von Braun’s daughter, and his ability to have emotions, to act illogically, serves as a monkeywrench in the orderly machine that is Alphaville.
If you haven’t seen it, stop reading now, and do yourself a favor. It’s one of a number of full-length movies recently uploaded to Google Video, so go watch it.
There exists a myriad films about amoral computers driving out the experience of humanity with logical function — within the genre of espionage, I’d also thought of discussing The Billion Dollar Brain and The Prisoner episode The General (luckily for you, our pal David @ PTK recently reviewed Billion Dollar Brain, The General, and Alphaville). Perhaps the most well known of these computers-gone-bad is HAL 9000 from the Kubrick/Clarke film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his oft-quoted line, “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave.”
But as with our previous discussions on robots, I question whether the actual evil might lie with the creators of HAL.
Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders addressed the idea of computers perpetrating evil deeds in their 2001 essay, “Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer Ethics” by creating a new nomenclature for…well, evil. They start by defining the nebulous term with the help of Kekes — evil is an action that “causes serious and morally unjustified harm” — and identify two traditionally acknowledged forms of evil: Moral Evil (ME), that which results from human autonomy and responsibility, and Natural Evil (NE), which comes from the natural world (i.e. earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters). These terms, they offer, are not enough to describe modern occurrences of evil:
More and more often, especially in advanced societies, people are confronted by visible and salient evils that are neither simply natural nor immediately moral: an innocent dies because the ambulance was delayed by the traffic; a computer-based monitor ‘reboots’ in the middle of surgery because its software is not fully compatible with other programs also in use, with the result that the patient is at increased risk during the reboot period. The examples could easily be multiplied. What kind of evils are these? ‘Bad luck’ and ‘technical incident’ are simply admissions of ignorance.
To this end, Floridi and Sanders offer a new term: Artificial Evil (AE). They address the question above as well — are not the evil actions of the man-made system the fault of the men who made them?:
…This leads precisely to the main objection against the presence of AE, namely that any AE is really just ME under a different name. Human creators are morally accountable for whatever evil may be caused by their artificial agents, as mere means or intermediaries of human activities (indirect responsibility)….In the same way as a divine creator can be blamed for NE, so a human creator can be blamed for AE.
Some technologies, they argue, exist as artificial and autonomous agents: (remember this was written in 2001) webbots, expert systems, software viruses, robots. These agents are nomologically independent from their human creators, and therefore their ability to initiate evil actions is also independent from their human creators.
Today’s questions:
1. Do you think there is truth to Floridi and Sanders’ claims?
2. If so, what can be done?
3. Do we see these autonomous agents, capable of enacting artificial evil, in current society, even if not on the scale of a city-running, dictatorial super-computer?
Food for thought!
Want to teach a computer the difference between good and evil? Or between Batman and James Bond? Try out this cool program, that in recent years has been turned into a toy…a toy bent on world domination!
Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.
If you’re new to reading Mister 8, you might not be aware of the super secret organization that this website is a member of — COBRAS, or the Coalition of Bloggers wRiting About Spies — and our roster is comprised of some of the best espionage fiction experts and authors in the blogosphere.
I thought it might be interesting as we approach each movie to also look at the reviews of my fellow COBRAS agents. Surprisingly, I think more have covered the later Palmer films than the originator, The IPCRESS File. Here’s a sample of what David Foster @ Permission to Kill had to say (click through for a full review):
Imagine James Bond, heading up a team of ninjas, who are standing on the lip of a hollowed out volcano which houses the lair of an evil mastermind. But instead of storming the complex, Bond and the ninjas have to wait for their L101 form to be processed, and they have to receive TX82 clearance from headquarters. Obviously the worlds that James Bond and Harry Palmer inhabit are very different. Bond’s is one of action and instinct, whereas Palmer’s is one of rules, bureaucracy and paperwork. Despite this less glamourous world, The IPCRESS File is an excellent film, and Harry Palmer is an intriguing hero.
David also has an interesting observation about promotion / packaging of the film — it looks sort of drab on the shelf next to the Bond flicks, Matt Helm, Derek Flint, etc. And yet, isn’t that the point?
The combination of stylish cinematography by Otto Heller (Peeping Tom, Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb), John Barry’s score, and the quasi-sci fi nature of the film’s use of electronic sounds and lighting as Brainwashing technology all combine to give The IPCRESS File a wonderful Spy Vibe Style.
Jason’s discussion of IPCRESS here is short, but he and guest writers explored it more in-depth later in a series on set design. We’ll be coming back to those posts in a later discussion of Ken Adams.
…IPCRESS remains the best of the trilogy as it established Harry Palmer as the antithesis to Bond, an irreverent, ironic, working-class agent who is coerced into government service because of his criminal skills. He’d prefer cooking to spying, doesn’t want to spy on weekends, and would prefer not to carry a gun. Director Sidney Furie used experimental techniques to illustrate the eavesdropping nature of espionage including camera angles from under cars and through lampshades. In addition, the scene in which Palmer thinks he’s being brain-washed in Albania while actually still being in London set the stage for the formula for mission: Impossible.
Please check out these reviews, and when you’re done, explore the rest of the sites on which they’re hosted. My fellow COBRAS agents have created a cornucopia of spy-fic information.
Do any of you Mister 8 readers have reviews of The IPCRESS File you’d like me to excerpt / link to? Let me know in the comments!
Welcome to the newest COBRAS member, Rob Mallows of Deighton Dossier blog and website fame. Rob has been a big supporter of the Harry Palmer series here at Mister 8, and we’re pleased to welcome him into the esteemed echelon of espionage essayists.
And I don’t want to leak intelligence out of school, but I’d expect some other forthcoming membership announcements….
Mister 8 is a blog about secret agents, spies, international crime-fighters and other characters and tropes of spy fiction, and an occasional comic featuring the titular Mister 8 and his work for DOS. This blog is published as often as the author can muster the energy to do so, and content ranges widely from talk of TV shows and movies, to scans of out-of-print comics, to tabs and chords from the great spy themes.
We welcome any feedback, either via the comments section of each post, or through our contact page!
Existential Ennui has some good news — Matt Helm is returning to print from Titan books in 2013!
* Unseen I Spy scripts leaked
Debbie Mazar, better known as “Tatia Loring” on the I Spy forum, recently got her hands on some unproduced scripts written by Ernie Frankel, and, while she can’t share the scripts themselves, is posting her copious notes for the rest of us to peruse! Up first: “The Day They Gave the Bride Away”.
(quite inexpensively too, if you’re willing to take a used copy).
