The Furniture: A Centennial Tribute to Ken Adam and The Ipcress File

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on images for magnified detail)

Ken Adam in 1976. Photo © Deutchse Kinemathek

Today marks the centennial of legendary production designer Ken Adam, the artist responsible for some of the biggest film sets of the 20th century. The first that comes to mind for me is the supertanker in The Spy Who Loved Me, built on the world’s largest sound stage. Adam designed dozens of secret military facilities and hidden lairs for the seven James Bond films he worked on. But his most famous is probably the “War Room” from Dr. Strangelove, another vast interior  - and the reason he had to turn down From Russia with Love.

Adam’s legacy is intimately connected to these atomic fantasies, which continue to influence our collective memory of the Cold War...

In 1999, the Victoria & Albert Museum even held a retrospective of his work with the title “Ken Adam - Designing the Cold War” - which is interesting, given how far his work strayed from geopolitical reality. His greatest successes are Cold War kitsch, iconic parodies that sometimes replace the truth in our recollection.

And it’s not as if the gadgets of military technology were entirely foreign to Adam. Born into a family of Jewish shopkeepers in Berlin, he was sent to boarding school in Edinburgh by his increasingly concerned parents. In 1934, the whole family arrived in England as refugees. An architecture student when the war broke out, he designed bomb shelters and then became a pilot in the RAF.

Perhaps this is why his Cold War designs are so brilliant. He was never interested in just tossing a bunch of weapons on screen, the bigger the better. There’s always another angle, a clear perspective behind the panoply. 

The war room in Dr. Strangelove is grand, but ridiculously so. The villainous lairs of his Bond films aren’t just impressive, they defy practicality. Blofeld’s hideout in You Only Live Twice is inside a volcano, while Stromberg’s underwater headquarters in The Spy Who Loved Me essentially sports an aquarium. Only someone with a sense of humor could have designed the space station in Moonraker.

Of course, his sense of perspective goes well beyond Bond and Kubrick. Keep in mind that Adam was also responsible for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His Oscar-winning work on The Madness of King George turned a palace into a hazy dream. The burning down of the Thanksgiving pageant in Addams Family Values is as joyfully designed as any Bond set piece.

But there’s one film that I think is essential to understanding Adam’s genius: The Ipcress File. It’s hard to track down these days, unfortunately, and it was totally overlooked by Oscar. But it did win three BAFTAs, including for art direction. The film, based on Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer novels, was intended to be an anti-Bond. Granted, Palmer (Michael Caine) actually has quite a bit in common with 007: his insubordination, his wit, and his tendency to go off like a loose cannon and wind up kidnapped.

The big difference between Palmer and Bond isn’t their character, it’s the world around them: Adam’s territory. Palmer spends no time gambling in fabulous resort hotels or spelunking in volcanic supervillain hideouts. He makes his own tea and his own breakfast - hence the enormous cardboard box of Special K in his bourbon-colored kitchen. There’s not a martini in sight. It’s a grittier spy life, though not exactly more “realistic.”

Adam, coming off of Goldfinger, was the perfect choice for The Ipcress File. It’s not just that he knew Bond’s milieu well enough to create its total opposite, though that certainly helped. But there’s also a very subtle warmth to Palmer’s world, a misery that at least feels familiar and cozy. It still has a sense of style and humor. 

The agents in Palmer’s first office are hanging their laundry and boiling their tea in the same small nook where they spy on the neighborhood.

Clandestine meetings between men take place in crowded supermarkets, amongst the walls of canned goods. Palmer distinguishes himself by paying extra for champignons, rather than plain button mushrooms. He’s a gourmet. And Adam runs with it, arranging the shelves with more attention to color than to product.

There are no elaborate set-ups at the opera, the Great Bazaar or the ski slopes of Switzerland. A poorly attended performance by a mediocre military brass band will do just fine. Imagine, if you will, Bond sitting on one of those folding chairs.

Yet, amidst this tour through London’s least-visited attractions, Adam manages to prove a remarkable facility for pulling villainous hideouts like rabbits out of a hat. Palmer gets himself abducted to “Albania,” which turns out to be just another London warehouse dressed up with some fake signs. At its core stands an IPCRESS machine, designed to brainwash him.

It is a large box. That’s it. And yet, somehow, it fits the part. It has the absurd confidence of a woman painted to death in gold, or a rocket-launching cigarette. How does it work? Palmer is dragged into the box, the box is pulled into the air, and an abstract film is projected onto it.

After all, spy movies are about suspension of disbelief. Whether you’ve presented your audience with a Moon Buggy in the Nevada desert, a fully operational space station or a game of smoke and mirrors in an empty factory, it’s all the same. It’s not the location that matters, it’s how you construct it and present it.

In a sense, The Ipcress File is a greater show of skill. There are fewer bells and whistles, by design. Yet despite that, it’s just as successful (and ridiculous) as any of Adam’s Bond films. And it’s no closer to the “reality” of the Cold War. 

It’s currently only available on DVD, but keep an eye out for it.

previous episodes of The Furniture

Comments

[Working stiff]

This 1965 film used to play on TV all the time.

[Inigo]

Serendipity. I was just reading about Ken Adam this afternoon. I’d never heard of him before. It’s in the memoir “Balancing Acts” by director Nicholas Hytner.

Hytner has never made a movie before, and was going to direct “The Madness of King George”, with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren, that he had directed as a play. Producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. encouraged him to ask for the best designer.

(page 139)
“Ken Adam won’t be interested in working with me. He works with Kubrick.”
“What’s the worst he can say? No?” said Sam, a question I’ve asked many directors since.

I tracked Ken down to a hotel in New York and turned up in his room with the screenplay. “Alan Bennett?” said Ken. “I’d very much like to do it.”

“I know nothing about making movies,” I said apologetically.

“Don’t worry,” said Ken. “I probably know enough to get us started.”