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BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN
Rating: 
UK. 1967.
Director – Ken Russell, Screenplay – John McGrath, Based on the Novel by Len Deighton, Producer – Harry Saltzman, Photography – Billy Williams, Music – Richard Rodney Bennett, Art Direction – Bert Davey. Production Company – Lowndes Productions.
Cast:
Michael Caine (Harry Palmer), Karl Malden (Leo Newbegin), Ed Begley (General Midwinter), Francoise Dorleac (Anya), Oscar Homolka (Colonel Stock), Vladek Sheybal (Dr Erwart), Guy Doleman (Colonel Ross)
Plot: Cockney secret agent Harry Palmer has quit the secret service and is now working not very successfully as a private detective. He receives a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night asking him to take a flask of eggs to Finland. But there he discovers that the package contains a deadly virus. He is catapulted into an international incident, having to deal with a mad Texan billionaire with a private army and his plan, which is being coordinated by an intelligent computer, to invade the Soviet Union and overthrow the Communist regime.
When the James Bond films became a phenomenon in the mid-1960s, they were followed by dozens of imitators. The most prolific of these were absurd comic spectacles such as the Matt Helm films – The Silencers (1966), Murderers Row (1966), The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) – and the more amusing Our Man Flint films – Our Man Flint (1965) and In Like Flint (1967). Amid these there was a far less substantial body of serious spy films such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Deadly Affair (1967) and The Quiller Memorandum (1967). The trilogy of Harry Palmer films, adapted from Len Deighton’s books, offered a marriage between the two approaches, contrasting on one hand Michael Caine’s cheeky bespectacled womanizing Cockney spy with a much more realistic milieu.
This was the third of the Harry Palmer films, the first two being the non-genre The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966). (These were followed thirty years later by two made-for-cable sequels – Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in St Petersberg (1996) – in which Caine again reprised the role). Deighton, a regular spy writer, had written seven Harry Palmer books. Although in an interesting piece of trivia the spy hero who always narrates in the first person was unnamed by Deighton in the books – he was given the name of Harry Palmer in the films and this is something that the series of books have now come to be generically known as.
This was the second film of Ken Russell. Russell had previously made French Dressing (1963) as well a number of highly acclaimed tv plays and innovative documentaries about various composers and artists for the BBC. Russell is maybe the wrong director for this style of spy thriller which makes a virtue out of a more realistic milieu. The film is free of the schoolboyishness that characterizes most of Russell’s later films but Russell’s typical frenetic energy runs the film at a pace considerably faster than the complex and rather confused plot does. Incident piles upon incident in a kaleidoscopic blur of double-dealings and lovely location hops. And by the end Russell leaps from the series somewhat tongue-in-cheek realism into the totally comic-book-ish – there’s a sequence on the ice floes that takes the film back into the fantastically unreal realm of the James Bond films that the Harry Palmer series sought to get away from. It’s not entirely unenjoyable. Nice Helsinki location photography and Michael Caine’s cheeky playing are plusses.
The look of the bespectacled Cockney spy was later borrowed by Michael Myers in his spy film spoof Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997). In a nice touch Caine was cast as Myers’ father in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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