Forget Bond: if you want a true taste
of 1960s espionage, says Martin B., you need to look to Jaguar, Ford – and
Michael C. …
If it was possible to time-travel then The
Ipcress File, the 1965 film that confirmed Michael Caine as a star, would
make a fine commercial for a trip back almost 50 years to a perfectly preserved
vision of mid-1960s London – a place seemingly populated Cold War spies, men in
bowler hats and villains driving 10-year-old Bentley Continentals. In this, the
first (and arguably best) of the Harry Palmer trilogy, Caine plays the Cockney
anti-Bond of Len Deighton’s books; a working-class secret agent in NHS specs,
with a taste for the finer things in life – birds, gourmet cooking and
classical music, “but birds most of all”. He lives in then-grotty Notting Hill
rather than Chelsea and buys his tweed sports jackets off the peg from Lord
John instead of Savile Row.
Jaguar
MK2
Cheerful, egalitarian Palmer was a character
more in tune with the changing times than the cruelly snobbish Bond, and the
series worked because, unlike all the other spy films of the time, Harry Palmer
was not even trying to take on Fleming’s super-suave hero – although they
emanated from the same stable. Harry Saltzman was the producer of both the 007
and the Harry Palmer films. The Ipcress File is memorable for its
self-conscious set-up shots, great supporting cast, plot twists and a freshness
that remains to this day. It brings you up short to realize that, in a film
dealing with a new world of high-tech espionage techniques, the British are
still traveling around on the last of our steam trains.
There are no amazing sets or improbably
super-villains. The action is played out on the streets of London, in austere
War Ministry offices, abandoned factories and bleak underground car parks;
there is a great scene in the one at Hyde Park Corner featuring a Mercedes 190
ambulance that I will wager is the same car that appears in Thunderball, that
year’s Bond film.
In Palmer’s world, agents don’t drive Aston
Martins. He is given a blue MkIII Ford Zodiac from the Ministry motor pool by
Deighton’s equivalent of Miss Moneypenny (a char lady with a fag clamped in the
corner of her mouth) and drives it around rainy London dreaming of the new
infrared grill he’s going to buy with his extra $150 a year. It is the first
time that we see Michael Caine behind the wheel on film (although at the time
he didn’t even have a license) and the Zodiac provides the main vehicular
interest, but there are no car chases. Along with the gold Mk2 Jaguar driven by
Palmer’s colleague Jock, it sets a mood of ordinariness in this stylishly shot
thriller, which features perhaps the best of all John Barry’s soundtracks.
Ford
Zodiac
The $1800 2.4 Mk2 was the entry-level
Jaguar, with the smallest of the XK engines but all the luxuries of the
bigger-engined 3.4 and 3.8-liter variants. The Zodiac, meanwhile, was the
ultimate English Ford – just under $1500-worth of glossy mid-Atlantic plushness
within a European concept of what a big car should be.
The short-stroke, 120bhp 2.4 was the poor
relation in that was the only XK-engined Jaguar that was unable to achieve
100mph, which is why the factory never released one for an official road test. Even
with the big-ends loosened to decrease friction – and despite 3/8in camshafts
and a B-type cylinder head – the most they could coax out of it was 98mph.
The 2.4 was, in fact, part of the marque’s
long tradition of smaller-engined saloons that goes back to the 11/2-liter
SS. This example boasts only to owners from new, 61,000 miles and a beautifully
preserved red-leather interior that has only recently emerged from beneath
protective covers. The Ford is a similarly time warp offering, having been
owned by one family until about 10 years ago and collected a number of show
awards along the way. Such cars have no problem finding owners: this one had
already been sold when we drove it.
Basing it around the monocoque architecture
of the Mk II Zodiac, Ford stylists – headed by Roy Brown from Detroit – managed
to make the Mk III look a more grown-up, sophisticated car, although it was
roughly the same size all round.
While the Zephyrs did service with the
police and as RAF staff cars, plus other generic ‘big-car’ duties, the zodiac
was much more aspirational. In fact, Ford gave the Zodiac version of the Mk III
a separate identity with quad headlamps and a six-light version of the angular
‘Galaxie’ roofline, whereas the four and six-cylinder Zephyrs had twin lights
and full-width C-posts.
Jaguar
MK2: sumptuous interior is a throwback to the previous decade
Yet the overall shape – with its restrained
fins and large areas of curved glazing – was more European than it had
previously been. Pietro Frua had been consulted early in the design process,
and his influence could still be sensed. It was a shape that lent itself
particularly well to Abbott’s station-wagon conversion, the prettiest of all
the substantial Ford estate cars.
The Mk III Zodiac was the marque’s first
100mph British model, and the first large Ford with four speeds. It was also
the swansong for the 2.5-liter straight-six, which, with its higher
compression, twin exhausts and bigger carburetor, gave 109bhp – 28% more than
before and an increase of 11bhp over the slightly more restricted Zephyr. It
also gained the ‘Executive’ badge when a fully optioned automatic version was
launched late in the model’s career in 1965 (as Ford began to market research
the way it sold its big cars), but the featured example is a standard manual
with the bench front seat.
