The Ipcress folder

ITV last night

Rating:

Full points for the nerve, man. Playing a straight bat and all that kind of stuff. It takes British courage.

Joe Cole has stepped into the old-school Cold War drama The Ipcress File to tackle a role indelibly linked with perhaps the greatest of all English actors, Michael Caine.

And he does it without cheating – same era, same style, same quirks – while artfully introducing changes that imprint his own personality on the piece.

He is the little crook with working-class roots, thrown into a world of gentlemen spies. Play the game, dear friend, and try not to let your ailments drop.

Cole plays Harry Palmer. But how is this possible? Even the name itself was coined specifically for Caine in the 1965 film adaptation of Len Deighton’s brilliant spy thriller.

Joe Cole has entered the old-school Cold War drama The Ipcress File to tackle a role indelibly linked with perhaps the greatest of all English actors, Michael Caine

At first glance, this remake has changed little. Palmer is still a womanizer, waking up to find with approval that his latest girlfriend has slipped out of bed for a morning bath…and left the door unlocked.

To better fill his eyes, he grabs his glasses. Caine’s NHS spec gave us one of the defining looks of the sixties.

Then it brews coffee with freshly ground beans – another echo of the iconic original.

But the details here make all the difference. These thick glasses are not National Health Service standards. These are designer frames. This time Harry has some money and his attire reflects that.

Caine wore a baggy army uniform like the former national serviceman he was. Cole wears it with swagger, as if his khaki had been cut in Savile Row.

Even business with the coffee grinder is considered tricky. A good drink counts for him but he is not obsessive. It’s not Palmer pastiche. The novel was a retort to Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Instead of a courteous, patriotic psychopath, Harry Palmer (who is never named in the book) is a petty thief with ambitions to be a rich villain.

Dalby’s top agent is a posh newbie, Jean Courtney (Lucy Boynton), whose arrogant family pays no attention to her “dumb little job” – they imagine she’s serving tea in the BBC World Service offices

It’s thrust into a world of snobs, spies, and old-school ties, where men wear bowler hats and dine in their clubs even on the brink of nuclear war.

This world is perfectly represented by Tom Hollander as the scheming Dalby, a gray man from Whitehall who runs his own counter-intelligence unit outside of MI6. Dalby says things like, “Don’t waste it, Palmer,” with the weariness of a man who believes civilization fell when the Empire lost India.

Hollander, never less than superb in high-tension dramas from The Night Manager to Baptiste, is utterly believable as the haughty Dalby.

Smarter and more devious than the old buffers around him in the civil service, he makes the mistake of imagining that his upbringing gives him a superiority over Palmer.

But he is as ruthless as only a public schoolboy can be. Luring Palmer into what could turn into a suicide mission in East Berlin, he offers her two options: return to do hard labor in a military prison or “I’ll take you to lunch.”

Cole plays Harry Palmer. But how is this possible? Even the name itself was coined specifically for Caine in the 1965 film adaptation of Len Deighton’s brilliant spy thriller.

Cole, whose most prominent role to date was as the rookie boss of a crime family in Gangs Of London, proves to be a master of understated nuance.

He doesn’t need Caine’s sarcasm – tiny gestures and flickers of expression tell us he knows full well how the world works.

The main difference with the original Ipcress is that it is no longer a male-only world. Both Dalby and Palmer recognize that women played an equal and essential role in Cold War subterfuge.

Harry relies on a widowed single mother, Frau Stuten (Anna Schumacher), for her criminal connections on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Dalby’s top agent is a posh newbie, Jean Courtney (Lucy Boynton), whose arrogant family pays no attention to her “dumb little job” – they imagine she’s serving tea in the BBC World Service offices.

The script approximates the plot of the book, with Palmer recruited to help save a British nuclear scientist from East German mobsters.

The kidnappers want a ransom but their KGB payers need boffin’s know-how to build a neutron bomb.

Everything is satisfyingly old-fashioned, crammed with period atmosphere but never succumbing to the temptation to be overly stylized. Typewriters rattle, cordless phones crackle, the streets of London stink of automobile fumes and class distinctions.

Some of Berlin’s exterior sets seem studio-bound and the actors are often static, not daring to move closer than two meters from each other. But it’s an inevitable byproduct of making movies under Covid and director James Watkins has done a smart job of masking the restrictions.

One technique is to place figures facing each other across tables, whether in a prison interrogation room amid chipped teacups or in a private restaurant with lead crystal brandy glasses.

Another is to stage shootouts and chases that send Palmer — and the plot — in new directions. Just when you think you’ve guessed what’s going on, something unexpected happens.

We left our working-class hero on a bus, after dodging a chatter of submachine gun bullets from hatchet-faced Stasi assassins. Harry looked completely at ease. The rest of us are on the edge of our seats for next week’s installment.