Funeral In Berlin (1966) was the second in the feature film trilogy based on Len Deighton's espionage capers of the snarky MI5 operative Harry Palmer , again played by Michael Caine.....
Produced by Harry Saltzman, the co-impresario of the Bond films, it's the most staid and conventional of the three films, coming after Sidney Furie's moody, visually arresting "The Ipcress File" (see post of 11/19/20) and Ken Russell's totally bonkers, cartoon-like "Billion Dollar Brain".(see post of 3//11/17)
Directed by 'Goldfinger's Guy Hamilton without any flair, style or even much enthusiasm, the film's watchability depends entirely on Michael Caine's superb deadpan delivery of his dialogue, dripping with barely concealed contempt and mockery of what's going on in the plot.
The Palmer series staked out its own grey area between the extremes of the spy genre......falling somewhere in between the superhero fantasy of the Bond films and the miserably grim gritty, John LeCarre world of films like "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold".
Unlike Sean Connery's Bond, who carefully rations out his dry quips, Caine's Harry Palmer speaks fluently in them. And unlike Bond's comfortable father-son relationship with his boss 'M', Palmer and his boss, the imperious Col Ross (Guy Doleman) can hardly contain how much they despise each other.
Ross ships Palmer off to West Berlin to arrange the defection of the wily old Bolshevik spymaster Col. Stok (grandly overplayed by Oscar Homolka, who reprised the role in 'Billion Dollar Brain') Palmer's already deduced that Stok's desire to switch sides is a blatant obvious con masking a hidden agenda......
To muddy the murky waters even further, Palmer also contends with the slick, duplicitous Johnny Vulkan (Paul Hubschmid), a shady character whose black market wheeling-dealing led to Harry's arrest and subsequent sentence to serve as an unwilling agent of Col. Ross. Throw in a drop dead sexy Israeli spy (Eva Renzi) and you've got a double and triple-crossing plot that becomes just a tad too complicated for its own good.
Nothing much to shout about here......the movie has no great ambitions or intentions and it just efficiently rolls along to its droll, ironic conclusion. But if you enjoy the sight of Caine having some deeply understated fun playing this character, then it's a sturdy 3 stars (***).....nothing less, nothing more......
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