You didn't come here to talk to me about button mushrooms and birds

Traditionally, my preferred antidote to the jet-setting espionage of James Bond has always been John le Carré. His Circus has its own exotic double-speak of lamplighters and scalphunters and pavement artists, but its heroes are generally anti-, burnt out or compromised or so polished with years of deception, it's difficult to tell who they are anymore. They may drink martinis and get shot, but they rarely karate-chop anyone. Their lives are measured with coffee spoons, paperwork, and rain. I may have to make room on this disillusioned shelf for Len Deighton, however; I just watched The Ipcress File (1965) last night.

It's a lot like a Bond film with a severe reality check. The pre-credits sequence could easily belong to one of SPECTRE's nefarious plots: all across Britain, top government scientists are mysteriously retiring, disappearing, or discontinuing their research; the latest has been snatched from his train compartment in broad daylight and counter-intelligence has been ordered to get him back. Cue the Shirley Bassey, yes? Cut to a razzing alarm and rumpled sheets where a fair-haired man wakes with a jolt, combat-focus scanning the room—which is blurry, because he hasn't yet put on his glasses. They are the square black-framed type and the first thing he does when he can see is make coffee. Welcome to the world of Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), where shadowy kingpins can be traced by parking tickets and what a secret agent really wants is a decent raise; our hero is a former black marketeer who picked intelligence work over prison and on the whole doesn't think he guessed wrong, although his current relegation to the most boring stakeout in London must make him wonder from time to time. His dossier describes him as "insubordinate, insolent; a trickster, perhaps with criminal tendencies," all of which he admits to. He also listens to baroque and classical music and cooks as though he's running a one-man restaurant out of his East End flat. (I am told that Deighton stunt-doubled for the closeups of Harry slicing up peppers and onions and expertly breaking eggs with one hand; if so, it's the best author cameo ever.) It follows naturally that the plot he finds himself kicked upstairs into should involve nuclear research, brainwashing, moles, and the CIA and it should not for one moment behave like a high-octane thriller or a political fantasy, instead reframing these familiar building blocks into something where a trip to the library, a tea break, and a military band butchering the overture to The Marriage of Figaro shape the action far more than fistfights or guns. There are mistakes. There are failures. There are yards of red tape. And no one has a deck of red queens up his sleeve.

They were made five years apart, but I was strongly reminded of Peeping Tom (1960) while watching The Ipcress File; I don't think it's simply the time period. Both films combine a deglamorized, almost wearily offhand approach to life on the ground of their potentially dime-novel material (a spy buys his groceries at the supermarket, even a serial killer has to work two jobs) with the visual equivalent of a heightened prose style. In Peeping Tom, it's the endlessly repeating symbolism of eyes and lenses and documenting and seeing truly, until every single act in the film reflects back onto the audience, the ultimate voyeur. In The Ipcress File, the camera is always peering through windshields and around doors, frustrated by call boxes and lampshades and parking meters, so that the viewer—like Harry—is always piecing together something half-glimpsed, waiting for the smallest shift of vantage that will turn an abstract puzzle into the identity of a man. It's a strikingly noir way of looking at an overcast afternoon world and I have no idea if it suits Deighton's language, but as a cinematic choice, I approved.

I need to read the original novel.