Directed by Sidney J. FurieProduced by Harry Saltzman
Screenplay by Bill Canaway and James Doran
Based on The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton
Starring Michael Caine
The film was intended as an ironically downbeat alternative portrait of the world of spies portrayed in the successful and popular James Bond films, even though one of the producers and others in the production team were also responsible for the Bond franchise. In contrast to Bond's public school background and playboy lifestyle, Palmer is a cockney who lives in a Notting Hill flat and has to put up with red tape and inter-departmental rivalries. When appointed to a new post, he immediately asks whether he will get a pay rise (by contrast, Bond's salary is hardly mentioned and he only goes to the best hotels, often using the presidential suite). The action is set entirely in "a gritty, gloomy, decidedly non-swinging" London with humdrum locations. And although Palmer is, like Bond, a gourmet, he shops in a supermarket. -Wikipedia
Check out the sequel Billion Dollar Brain locations here.
Fight on the steps: Royal Albert Hall steps
Dalby and Ross plot their devious strategies: St James’s Park
Meeting with Major Dalby: Serpentine Road, Hyde Park
More great research. Pity the red phone box was a prop - - fans would have made a call from there just for the hell of it: famous because Sidney Furie never got past the phone box to shoot the fight scene outside the Albert Hall. Producer Saltzman saw the rushes and went mad, and producer-director relations soured for the rest of the production. But this may be the greatest film of the '60s just for compositions alone.
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