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.
Ipcress File cover with Michael Caine
“You have to remember I saw my first movie at fifteen; I’ve had to make up for lost time. The first film I saw was on television, The IPCRESS File; I loved the way Michael Caine broke eggs for an omelette.”
“Broke eggs?”
Kadi nodded. “Tenderly. I’d never seen a man cook before.”
– From Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer by Dorothy Gilman
The world first met the “Harry Palmer” character in 1962, when England was then in the midst of a mod revolution led by, as culture studies scholar Dick Hebdige says, “working-class dandies.” Mod men wore their hair longer, held exacting tastes in slim Italian suits, and played with concepts of androgyny in their personal appearance. Hebdige, in his Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things refers to Palmer as, “a fictional extension of mod,” with his preference for food, clothes and cigarettes from France and Italy—the “continental cool” (75).
But the heroes of films at that time were still rugged, handsome, tough, with no time for cooking. Caine, writing in his autobiography, What’s it All About?, says that the filmmakers were overly concerned with playing down any aspect of the character that could be deemed homosexual (175):
Sid Furie the director and Harry [Saltzman] went off to ‘de-gay’ my role in the script. The supermarket cart problem had already been solved by having me use mine as a weapon. The glasses were satisfactorily ‘butched up’ by having Sue Lloyd, who played the romantic lead, ask me if I always wear glasses. I say, ‘I only take them off in bed,’ she looks at me for a moment, then reaches forward and takes them off.
But Caine as Palmer, and shortly after, Caine as Alfie, helped redefine the concept of the masculine Brit. Andrew Spicer writes in his Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema that:
Critics were reserved about Sidney Furie’s over-ingenious ‘eavesdropping’ style of direction, but admired the film’s freshness and contemporaneity, the ‘current bachelor neatness’ of Palmer’s flat, and a working-class figure whose ‘Cockney vowels’ did not preclude an appreciation of Mozart and champignons. The role established Caine as a major star and a new type whose attraction was defined by Penelope Gilliatt: ‘Intransigence and opportunism are as central now to sex-appeal in English male acting as charm and height used to be. Make a crack, cheat the boss, expect nothing, go for the lot, and never commit murder except on expenses. The girls fall like skittles.’
Followed by the androgyny of the glam period, the Palmer character seems much closer to the John Wayne end of the spectrum of masculinity. Indeed, Caine feels that, ironically, the character once seen by Saltzman and Furie as too homosexual now serves as the icon for British manliness. As he told the LA Times in 1999:
“If you think of ‘The Italian Job,’ ‘Get Carter’ and ‘Alfie,’ then to young English guys now I represent English heterosexual masculinity without any doubts. You don’t look at me and say, I wonder if he’s gay? You look at me and think, he’s a geezer [regular guy], he’s one of us.
