Ipcress On Blu-Ray

Reader Kees Stam, keeper of the web's definitive Harry Palmer site, has alerted me to a crucial DVD release I missed before Christmas: The Ipcress File has been released on Blu-Ray in Great Britain! This is great news for videophiles. Who wouldn't want to own what's arguably one of the best looking spy movies of the Sixties (boasting truly ingenious widescreen composition) in the best looking format on the market? This is a PAL disc, but supposedly all-region. (I confess, I'm not quite sure myself how regions work on Blu-Ray.) Sadly, none of the fabulous extras from Network's DVD release (or Anchor Bay's long out-of-print Region 1 disc) are carried over, so even if you buy the Blu-Ray for the ultimate in picture quality, you'll need to hang onto your old copies for supplemental features. Right now, Amazon.co.uk has the Ipcress Blu-Ray for half price!

Billion Dollar Brain Sound-track On CD

Richard Rodney Bennett's fantastic score to Billion Dollar Brain, my personal favorite of the excellent Harry Palmer trilogy, is finally getting a legit CD release courtesy of Film Score Monthly. The catch is... it's only available as part of a giant set called The MGM Soundtrack Treasury (1959-1983), and the set costs a lot of money: $129.99, to be exact. But for twenty highly sought-after scores, however, it's not much at all; it works out to be less than $6.50 a soundtrack if my math is correct. For spy fans, though, it is a lot to pay for Billion Dollar Brain alone. The Treasury came about as a sort of catch-all for rare scores demanding remastered CD releases, but that didn't really make sense on their own, often because of their brevity. Billion Dollar Brain, for instance, ran just under thirty-two minutes on the United Artists Records album master, the only surviving source for the recording. That was too short to justify a solo release, but the folks at FSM had trouble thinking of a suitable companion. While going through all the possibilities, they realized they had enough loose ends to create this amazing-sounding box set, so they did.

In order to keep the cost of the set down, they didn't print their usual super-detailed liner notes as a book; instead they made them all available online for free. The good news there is that it means everyone can read their excellent, typically comprehensive liner notes for Billion Dollar Brain here, and learn a lot about the movie and the score!

I'm pretty sure this is the first legit CD release this fine score has ever had. I have a CD containing it and John Barry's The Ipcress File together which I got at Tower Records way back when, but despite that respectable place of purchase, I'm fairly certain it's a bootleg. I really wish I could afford this set, because it's got a lot of great stuff in it (including Lalo Schiffrin's full score for Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You, a favorite guilty pleasure of mine), but I don't even have FSM's Superman box set yet, so I'll have to hold off for now. But for spy music aficionados with deep pockets, I'd say Bennett's amazing score is worth the steep price!

Funeral In Berlin DVD Back In Print

This may be old news for most readers, but it had slipped by me, so perhaps it slipped by others who are interested as well. Paramount's Region 1 Funeral In Berlin DVD, which had been out of print for a number of years and commanding high prices on Ebay (I know; I sold an extra copy there myself!) has quietly crept back into print some time in the last year. I'm not sure when, because Amazon still lists the original 2001 release date, but it's currently in stock at both Amazon (for $26.99) and DeepDiscount, where you could use that coupon and take it home for just over eleven bucks! (And I still see this priced at sixty in some used disc shops.) For the uninitiated, Funeral In Berlin is the second in the superb trilogy of Harry Palmer spy movies from the 1960s starring Michael Caine. Based on Len Deighton's books (wherein the hero went unnamed) and produced by Harry Saltzman as the antithesis to his other spy franchise hero, all three Palmer movies are absolute essentials for connoisseurs of the genre. The original, The Ipcress File, remains out of print in the United States and fetches upwards of $70. The last (that's right, I'm not counting the lacklustre '90s revivals), Billion Dollar Brain, finally became available a few years ago, albeit slightly edited; it's missing a brief snippet containing Beatles music due to famously exorbitant licensing fees. Still well worth it though!

Sixties Spies On The Big Screen In The Big Apple

And I thought all the great film events happened here in LA! After missing out on this winter's classic James Bond screening series at the Aero in Santa Monica (which was successfull enough to warrant a follow-up series focusing on the Roger Moore era coming this fall!), New Yorkers will get their revenge with a chance to see a whole slew of Bond and various Sixties spy movies at the Film Forum in April and May. The theater will play every Bond movie, official and unofficial, from Dr. No to A View To A Kill except for Moonraker. They will intersperse them with theatrical rarities The Silencers, Our Man Flint, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Our Man In Havana (which isn't even on DVD), Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, the unmissible Harry Palmer double feature of The Ipcress File and Billion Dollar Brain, and the equally heavenly double-bill of Fathom and Danger: Diabolik!

If you're a New Yorker who's never seen Fathom, and you consider yourself a spy fan, you really owe it to yourself to check this one out! Fathom is best described as a fluffy delight. Yes, I will hate myself in the morning for using that term, but it's pretty apt. It stars Raquel Welch at her very sexiest in a lime green bikini as a skydiving dental hygienist who gets mixed up with spies. Among these spies is the great Clive Revill in the scene-stealing role of Serapkin, a campy Sixties spy villain on par with Dirk Bogarde's tour-de-force turn as Gabriel in the otherwise disposable Modesty Blaise. It's a humongously enjoyable little film that I should really review soon for this blog.

Anyway, if you're in the Northeast, it looks like you're in for a good time this spring. And I'm jealous!

Thanks to a forum poster on CommanderBond.net for getting the word out on this series.