![]() ![]() The first day on set, Caine remembers him demonstrating his regard for it by throwing it to the ground and literally setting it on fire. ![]() The two would butt heads bitterly throughout the shoot, to the point where they were barely on speaking terms, and only the enthusiasm of the editor, 007 veteran Peter Hunt, saved Furie from being sacked and replaced at an early stage.įurie’s main problem? He simply hated the script. In a way, Saltzman only had himself to blame, having hired Furie off the back of his previous film, a British biker drama called The Leather Boys (1964), which was daring for its day in featuring a major gay character. But Caine, and the young Canadian director, Sidney J Furie, stuck to their guns. ![]() The early rushes of this stuff alarmed Saltzman, who was worried that Palmer’s red-blooded heterosexual credentials were, shall we say, not sufficiently clear. Perhaps the idea of tinned French champignons isn’t exactly what we’d call haute cuisine these days, but it was quite advanced for 1965. (Sales of coffee beans quadrupled in Britain in the mid-1960s, thanks in part to his efforts.) He was also a meticulous gourmand, not unlike Deighton himself, who had a weekly cookery column in the Observer, a clipping of which can even be glimpsed in Harry’s kitchen. He even wore glasses, which practically no male lead since Harold Lloyd had done.īond might have been hitting his stride with all the girls and the gadgets Harry Palmer was more likely to clamber out of bed groping for his specs, and to spend the film’s opening minutes fussing about with his morning coffee. They wanted him to be a kind of anti-Bond: deglamorised, insolent, and glumly going about his job in mid-1960s London, while living in a Notting Hill bedsit. ![]() First they needed a name – “Harry Palmer” was Caine’s idea – to make the spy sound as ordinary as possible. Back then, Saltzman earmarked The Ipcress File as “Bond on a budget”, but Caine and everyone else who worked on the original film had other ideas. This murky tale of Cold War brainwashing, almost 60 years later, is becoming a new TV mini-series, airing on ITV in the spring. One thing: his real accent would be much more suitable this time than the Zulu one. On the spot, he offered Caine a seven-year deal, which the cash-strapped actor delightedly accepted. Saltzman had just snapped up the rights for £12,500, and had been looking in vain for his leading man even though the nameless main character, a nondescript spy, was worlds apart from the posh officer Caine had just played, the producer saw star quality. Saltzman asked him if he was familiar with Len Deighton’s 1962 novel The Ipcress File, which, as it happened, Caine was right in the middle of reading. But the proposition, instead, was a career-changer. Saltzman was co-producer on the Bonds with Cubby Broccoli, and Caine immediately assumed he might be in line for a small part. In 1964, a 31-year-old Michael Caine was having dinner with his roommate Terence Stamp at the Pickwick Club in Soho, when the big-cheese producer Harry Saltzman sent a note over to their table, asking Caine if he’d like to chat over coffee afterwards.Ĭaine had been toiling in films for 15 years with little reward, and while he’d just shot his best role to date in Zulu (1964), the £4,000 salary wasn’t likely to keep him in filet mignon for long – certainly not compared with his friend Sean Connery, who’d just earned an enviable £500,000 for the third James Bond film, Goldfinger. ![]()
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