The Ipcress File Review: A Mostly Tedious Throwback to Cold War-Era Spy Fantasies

Famously adapted into a 1965 film starring Michael Caine, Len Deighton’s novel The Ipcress File is a Cold War-era story very much of its time. Writer John Hodge’s serial adaptation, set in 1963, attempts to flesh out the book’s peripheral characters and stretch the plot out to fill six episodes, but the results are by and large tedious.

In the first episode, Harry Palmer (Joe Cole) is hardly the suave, bespectacled spy that he will later become. He’s a guard at the Berlin Wall, making money on the side by smuggling contraband until he’s captured and sent to prison. In need of Palmer’s illicit expertise and connections, Major Dalby (Tom Hollander) has the disgraced ex-soldier released into his espionage unit, the clunkily titled War Office Operational Communications (Provisional).

The unit’s name hardly lends itself to a catchy slogan, which is an intentional touch of drab realism that reflects the original film’s status as a more serious alternative to the world of James Bond. In lieu of punchy action and globe-trotting glamour, Sidney J. Furie’s film went out of its way to depict the drudgery of espionage, rarely leaving the confines of a gray London as it portrays the departmental politics that play out within dreary offices and warehouses.

By contrast, the miniseries takes a much rosier—and conspicuously sexier—approach to the same time period. There are a lot of attractive actors sporting bright, stylish outfits who find the time to travel to more picturesque locales, where they, in one case, attempt to seduce a person of interest. And as if to temper this embrace of the typical superspy fantasy, the new Ipcress File makes quite an effort to center the struggles of the marginalized, with murmurings about the power structures that keep down a working-class bloke like Palmer.

A few plot threads intersect with the Bay of Pigs and how governments take care of the people—or, rather, fail to—by throwing them into the meat grinder. In particular, the role of Jean Courtney (Lucy Boynton) is greatly expanded: She’s now portrayed as an experienced WOOC(P) spy who’s every bit as capable as Palmer but who must deal with double standards due to her gender and the devastating effects that has on her personal life.

This Ipcress File, though it understands the demands of spycraft, is more romanticized than Deighton’s book and Furie’s film. It conjures up a fantasy about espionage only to tear it down. But even if the show’s realist tendencies, mainly its foregrounding of social issues, weren’t undercut by its infatuation with the era that it replicates, the level of insight here hardly justifies the effort. After six episodes, the series manages only to repeat the most commonplace observations, such as how the business of spycraft takes a nasty psychological toll on those involved, and how its pawns grow disillusioned with the powers they represent.

The series has a few charming deviations from the 1965 film, and the allegiances between its characters are excitingly muddled, especially across scenes where they make veiled threats to one another in polite settings. But expanding the story has done its tired themes few favors, while calling into question why the focus is on Cole’s bland Harry Palmer, whose personal struggles are drearily straightforward compared to those of the other characters. The series is at its best when it’s simply and uncritically throwing back to ’60s spy fantasy.