Trivia / The Ipcress File

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Harry Palmer is the first action hero to wear glasses (Michael Caine is myopic in Real Life). Caine chose to wear glasses, because he expected the film to be the first of a series, similar to the Bond movies. He feared being over-identified with the character of Harry Palmer, and so he wore the glasses, so that he could remove them for other roles.
  • In the novels, the name of the lead character is never revealed. So Caine and producer Harry Saltzman tried to think of a boring name for the hero. Caine suggested "Harry" which Saltzman found rather amusing. Caine then remembered a boring classmate named Tommy Palmer. So "Palmer" became the surname.^note This becomes doubly amusing today, as another famous bespectacled literary character was given an almost identical name, for the exact same reason - to sound boring and ordinary.
• Deleted Role: Barbara Roscoe had a role in the film, and appears in promotional stills. But her scenes were deleted from the final print.
• Hostility on the Set: Producer Harry Saltzman hated Sidney J. Furie and his oddball style. Furie later described Saltzman as "a tyrant, but a lovable tyrant".
  • After one heated argument on location in Shepherd's Bush, Furie stormed off the set in tears, declared "Fuck it, I'm off this picture" and boarded a bus to Oxford Street. When Michael Caine pointed Saltzman in his direction, Saltzman yelled, "Nobody leaves my set on a fucking bus" and they both gave chase in Saltzman's Rolls Royce. They managed to catch up and Saltzman yelled to the conductor, "Stop the fucking bus! You've got our director on board". Furie was persuaded to return, but relations remained frosty.
  Harry despised me so much, he really did. But I stood my ground.
  • After another week of disagreements, this again came to a head:
  Furie: Saltzman came by one day and saw the footage and thought it was the worst shit he'd ever seen and told me that when the editor Peter Hunt returned from his holiday, if he didn't like it, he was firing me. "Well fuck you, I said, and I tore up the pages of what we were shooting, "Here, you canhave it all back". And then Michael said, "no, no, just stay". Because I was walking. No producer's going to tell me the editor will decide my fate. But then a few days later Peter Hunt came back and he said, "Harry, I've just seen the rushes and you shouldn't be mad at Peter, you should kiss him". After that day, Harry never really talked to me again.
  • According to Hunt:
  Saltzman was a terrible bully towards Sid and could be towards others. I don't know why he carried this on with him. Everything was this intense battle of wills between the two of them.
  • According to Ken Adam, Saltzman flew into a rage upon seeing the sparsely designed set he'd designed with Furie's approval. He stormed off the set in a temper, only to return two hours later and give it a thumbs up as if nothing had happened. Adam later claimed that when he won a BAFTA for his work on the film, Saltzman practially didn't speak to him for the rest of the evening.
  He sees this bare set and he went ape. He started screaming at me, he said, "You're trying to get between me and the director". I said, "I discussed it with the director". And of course, for the unit it was great fun because tey always enjoyed a big fight going on.
  • At the end of principal photography, Saltzman banned Furie from the editing room. He even banned anyone connected with the film to have any dealings with Furie or even talk to him, including John Barry, who secrectly kept Furie updated on how the edit was going.
• Hypothetical Casting: Len Deighton was a fan of Steptoe and Son and envisioned Harry H. Corbett as Harry Palmer.
• Looping Lines: Harry Palmer is speaking about an American agent, but Michael Caine's lip flaps clearly show that he actually said "CIA agent" on set and dubbed "American agent" over that shot in post.
• Production Posse: Quite a few James Bond alumni worked on the film - producer Harry Saltzman, composer John Barry, production designer Ken Adam and editor Peter Hunt.
• The Red Stapler: Sales of coffee beans quadrupled following the film's release, likely inspired by the opening scene where Harry grinds his own beans and brews them in a French press.
• Romance on the Set: Sue Lloyd was having an affair with Sidney J. Furie, a situation that reached a very public boiling point:
  Sidney arrived with his suitcases on my doorstep, which was not cool at all because his wife was in the pudding club. Harry Saltzman's wife, which I didn't blame her for at all because she happened to be a great friend of Sid Furie's wife, together they decided that I should never work again. My agent told me that Saltzman had said he will see to it that you will never work again.
  • It is unclear whether Saltzman followed up on his threat, but Lloyd's career slowed down afterwards.
  And to think I had the same contract as Michael Caine on The Ipcress File. And I blew it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Christopher Plummer turned down the role of Harry Palmer in order to star in The Sound of Music, while Richard Harris turned it down in favour of Caprice with Doris Day, a film he wound up despising. Both men regretted the decision.
  • Joan Collins had been considered for Jean Courtney.
  • Robert Shaw wrote a draft that wasn't used. He also hoped to play the lead role.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to Sidney J. Furie, the script was written as it was being shot:
  Literally, we'd get there in the morning and sometimes there were no pages. So, I'd say to our cameraman Otto Heller, take two hours to light that staircase, by which time pages arrived, we made carbon copies of them and the actors would quickly learn the lines and away we went. And that happened a lot.

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