Harry Palmer: Reluctant Spy

Harry Palmer: Reluctant Spy Funeral in Berlin (1966), Directed by Guy Hamilton By Fearless Young Orphan The good old days of the Cold War – ah, how spy novelists must miss them. This was a gentleman’s game of espionage, and the storytellers would have us believe that there was something akin to an elite club of awesomely cool guys who maneuvered against each other throughout the world. They would face off and try to kill each other, but were always a little stuck in admiration too. These 1960s spy flicks, if they are not aping Bond directly, fall into a different category: the elegant espionage thriller. Funeral in Berlin is one such, based on a novel by Len Deighton, and the second in the series of films made about secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). The first was The Ipcress File, a famous movie, which is strangely hard for me to get my hands on. Nobody seems to have a copy of the damn thing for renting, so I went online to try and find a copy for purchase and found it was more than I really wanted to pay. After all, thirty bucks is half a computer game. So we’re out of order, and the anal-retentive in me is having fits. “What the hell,” says she. “You can’t talk about Harry Palmer movies when you haven’t seen the first one.” But I tell her to go organize something and move on. I haven’t read the books, either. One might say that I am ill-prepared. Then again, a movie like Funeral in Berlin is a stand-alone experience. The Ipcress File certainly must not be required viewing, because I did just fine. Knowing what happened before would be gravy. I’d be interested to know why exactly ex- military man Harry Palmer, who looks dapper in his Michael Caine Englishness, nerdy in his black-framed glasses and not much more than 25 years old, is being entrusted with British espionage for MI:6. He’s recalcitrant. He doesn’t want to be there. Conversations indicate that the only reason he is spying now is because he could either choose to do this or choose to serve a prison sentence for something, which might have been explained in the first film. I guess eventually I’ll find out. The policy of blackmailing unwilling participants into doing your espionage seems Harry Palmer (left) hides under a veneer of uptight dorkiness. hazardous at best: how could you ever trust such a man? Wouldn’t he be extremely likely to try to gum up the works, undermine his agency, avenge himself against his persecutors? Possibly there is some gentleman’s honor at play, because though Harry jokes about defecting and doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit pleased with anything MI:6 asks him to do, he still does it, with a certain amount of intelligence and flair. Harry is a fun man to watch: he’s very smart, very dry-witted, unafraid and unconcerned and yet rather steely in his resolve. Michael Caine has a lot of charm which he brings to the part. Possibly he’s just playing himself, but there is worse that could be said about a performance. As mentioned before, he does have some very thick and nerdy black glasses, and he does seem to inhabit his trench coat without fail, so in short, he looks like somebody’s young father on the way to the office for the workday. It’s probably how a spy should look: unassuming and ordinary. So it’s the 1960’s and Berlin is a twister-game of walls and sectors; everybody wants into somewhere or out of somewhere, and the rules for who gets to go where are part of the fun. Well, you know, fun for us to watch; probably not fun for people who lived there. Anyway there’s the Soviet Colonel Stok who wishes to defect to England. Yes, he’s Soviet. He’s working in the Russian Sector of East Berlin. So we’re actually dealing with two facets of the Cold War: the USSR and East Germany. That’s a lot for Harry to work with. Colonel Stok wants his escape arranged by a man named Kreutzman, who has arranged many daring escapes and is known for his brilliance in planning. Stok is an amusing character as well, and at first he is patronizing to Harry, who must meet the man ahead of time. He’s jovial and his wants are simple: just to retire in England away from all this political crap. As they work out plans to contact Kreutzman and arrange an escape, Stok comes to like Harry and says, “You’re not as stupid as you look.” That’s quite true. People continuously underestimate Harry, because as I said, he is ordinary and unassuming. But he’s a thinker who keeps his cards close to the chest. Harry has the feeling that Stok does not want to defect, not really. That something else is happening here. No one takes his belief seriously. Well, they should have. Harry’s intuitions are solid. There is something else happening. There is rather a lot happening, in fact, as Harry waits for the defection plans to come together while he stays in West Berlin. Why, for example, is Harry picked up and made the boy-toy of a tall beautiful fashion model? Samantha is rather out of his league, but she’s all over him, and Harry is not so vain that he doesn’t understand that this must be a setup of sorts. Samantha wants something more than companionship from Harry. Oh, she gets the companionship too. Many a morning shot shows Harry leaving her flat. He knows there is more going on here than it seems, and has her house burgled and searched. She has a lot of different passports under different names. Thus, a spy. But for whom? Now at this point, if you want to retain your understanding of the plot, I suggest you buckle yourself down and pay attention like it’s the last lecture before finals. Because these “elegant espionage thrillers” seldom lead their viewers by the hand. If this movie got remade today, there would be a helpful montage of explanations, expository dialog and film clips showing us what happened so we could understand without thinking too hard. Not so back then, when the creators rather assumed you would be watching carefully and using your brain. The plot becomes quite convoluted. Yes, I watched carefully and used my brain, and there are still some things I can’t connect, and I’m no dummy, so you know, don’t feel bad if you can’t follow it all. I mean, my generation did have our brains partially destroyed by the advent of cable television so we can’t really help it if connecting the dots is difficult. I know Samantha is an Israeli agent, and that she is trying to find information about Nazi war criminals who stole from their Jewish prisoners. I know that Kreutzman arranges for Stok to be transported out of East Berlin in a coffin (thus the “funeral” of the title) and that the papers provided for the corpse happen to also be the papers that match one of the war criminals on Samantha’s list of bad guys. I know that when the coffin arrives in Berlin, it is opened and there is someone else inside besides Stok. I know that the war criminal everyone wants is not dead but is in fact alive and well, and interfering mightily with everyone’s plans. I know that there are people involved in this conspiracy from one end of Europe to the other. The intricacies are interesting and I think, I think, they all eventually work out and make sense. Still, I did spend a while in the latter portion of the movie trying to figure how one plot thread managed to become entangled with the other, and I still don’t quite have it worked out. Not a deal breaker, though. We can wade through problematic plots when our hero is appealing, a fact that any fan of James Bond knows well. Granted, James Bond plots typically erred on the side of coincidence and zaniness, and Harry Palmer’s plot was burdened with complication, but in either case, we still like our spy and want to see him extricate himself. The style of the movies is very 60s, which is marvelous in a way. You’ll never see more Volkswagen Beetles than on the streets of Berlin in 1965. Don’t play “slug bug” or your friends will be badly bruised. The movie shows some amazing footage of Berlin and London, the kitschy qualities of all that older advertising and architecture, and the classic views that never change, such as Trafalgar Square, and the dismal views of a Berlin that is still rebuilding after a was almost two decades earlier. Movie tourists will be very pleased. On the downside, modern viewers are likely to become antsy with the deliberate pacing. This is no action movie. The majority of the motion is walking and talking; this movie is jammed to the top with talking. There is very little music to punctuate the scenes. And we are unaccustomed to finales being quiet affairs where the purpose is not to kick ass but to sneak away. I myself got a bit restless, and must blame the overlong climax and those loose plot threads.

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