In short: Funeral in Berlin (1966)

Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is still working rather reluctantly for one of the British intelligence services. His boss Ross (Guy Doleman) sends him into divided Berlin to help organize the defection of a Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), a man who is (quite ironically) responsible for the security of the Wall.

Palmer remains skeptical concerning the Colonel's real motives, but nobody cares much about his doubts.

Then there are some other complications Harry has to cope with, like former Nazis, the Mossad, and two million dollars in a Swiss bank account. All this should be enough to ruin anyone's cheer; Harry, not being someone who's in the game for small change, also hasn't lost that thing people in his business can only ill afford - a conscience.

Funeral in Berlin is not quite as good as The IPCRESS File. I blame director Guy Hamilton, whose work here is professional but not as inspired as Sidney J. Furie's work in the earlier film - just about what I'd expect from the director of Goldfinger. The film lacks some of the visual inventiveness and the stylized use of unstylishness of the first picture. It also starts out a little too slow for my taste and really gets its groove after the first thirty or forty minutes.

There's fortunately still a lot to like about the film. Once it gets going, the plot becomes clever and complicated enough to satisfy - the last thirty minutes are really quite flawlessly constructed and excellently paced, although they too are missing some of the more intriguing subtext of the first Palmer film. Additionally, the acting is classy throughout and grants most characters more depths than the script seems to contain.

The film also distinguishes itself by an excellent sense of detail: as a German, I'm always fascinated by the way foreign films show Germany. Often, this fascination turns to bemusement when a film shows itself to only nominally take place in Germany and instead bumbles through scenes of British and American actors trying badly to imitate a German accent, while extras scream phonetically learned German of dubious quality and sense ("Du Schweinhund!"). Not so here. This Berlin has a lot in common with real post-war Germany of the time. It's even populated with actual German actors - the sort who are able to act, even! This gives the film a quality of realism I can get behind, yet there are still some bizarre blunders, my favorite being the name of Palmer's old friend Johnny Vulkan (Paul Hubschmid) - I suppose we have Len Deighton's novel to thank for that?

I do sound rather lukewarm about the movie, don't I? Truth be told, if this weren't the sequel to The IPCRESS File I'd probably sound quite a bit more excited. This is an excellent film, it's just not quite as good or deep as my favorite old-school espionage movie.

 

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