Billion Dollar Brain

Plot synopsis:
Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), who has left MI5 to work as a private investigator, is told by a mechanical voice on the phone to take a package to Helsinki. The package contains six virus-laden eggs that have been stolen from the British government's research facility at Porton Down. In Helsinki, he is met by Anya (Françoise Dorléac) who takes him to meet her handler, Harry's old friend Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden). Leo is in love with Anya, but Harry knows that she is only pretending to reciprocate. Leo takes Harry to a secret room where a computer issues daily instructions to Leo and Anya. The computer speaks in the same voice as the one which summoned Harry to Helsinki.
After determining that he cannot trust either Leo or Anya, Harry is abducted by his former MI5 superior, Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman), who coerces him into working once more for the British government in pursuing the conspiracy. Harry is ordered to Latvia where he embeds with some rebels to obtain intelligence for Leo's operation. After being captured and left for dead, Harry is extracted from Russia by Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), an old acquaintance from the KGB. Back in Helsinki, Anya tries to kill Harry while seducing him, then confesses that the computer told her to kill him. Harry locks her in a room and waits for Leo at the computer's location. Leo offers to pay off Harry for his trouble, but Harry insists on half of the money Leo is getting from whatever the conspiracy is all about.
The pair go to Texas, where Harry meets oil tycoon General Midwinter (Ed Begley). The General proudly displays his billion-dollar 'brain', a room full of computers that dispenses orders to his agents around the world. The General is in the midst of planning a rebellion in Latvia which he thinks will trigger the fall of the Soviet Union. His plan is to infect the Red Army with the viruses, while using his Latvian agents to begin a rebellion as his own private army invades. Meanwhile, Leo subverts the General's computer orders and escapes with the eggs. The General realises Harry is a double agent, but Harry convinces him that he can track Leo down.
Back in Helsinki, Leo and Anya board a train for the Soviet Union with the eggs, but Harry, accompanied by two of Midwinter's men, intercepts them and escorts Leo off the train with the eggs. Anya shoots Harry's bodyguards as the train pulls away from the station. Leo runs after the train and hands the eggs to Anya. As he tries to pull himself up, Anya pushes him off the train and shrugs as he looks at her in bewilderment. "She used me," Leo tells Harry. He then offers to help Harry stop the General's insane plan, which could trigger World War III.
In personnel carriers made from oil tanker trucks from his company, the General leads his private army across the frozen Baltic Sea into Latvia. Harry and Leo attempt to catch up with the General, but he orders their car to be fired upon and Leo is killed. Meanwhile, Col. Stok is fully aware of the invasion and orders bombers to intercept the convoy. Rather than dropping their bombs directly on the convoy, they simply drop the bombs on the ice in the convoy's path, breaking the ice (a homage to the 1938 film Alexander Nevsky). The entire convoy plunges into the freezing water, and all the vehicles and soldiers — including the General himself — sink below the ice to a cold, watery, Baltic grave.
Harry awakes alone on an ice floe. Col. Stok arrives in a helicopter with Anya and the eggs. He gives the eggs to Harry. "We don't need them," he says, "We have our own ideas." Stok confirms that Anya is one of his spies. Back in London, Harry delivers the eggs to Colonel Ross, who agrees to reward Harry with a promotion. However, when he opens the package to inspect the eggs, he finds they have hatched and the box is full of baby chicks.

Tags: avant garde, murder

Review:
Russians Good, Americans Bad. Michael Caine's first Harry Palmer film, "The Ipcress File", seems to have been deliberately designed to present a quite different picture of life in the British Secret Service to that shown in the James Bond films.
Whereas Bond is a glamorous figure who lives a life of luxury, travels to exotic locations, drives expensive cars and seduces a succession of glamorous women, Palmer earns an average wage, lives in a seedy and down-market flat, shops at his local supermarket, drives a Ford Zephyr rather than an Aston Martin and never travels outside London where he is mostly employed in dull, bureaucratic work.I have never seen the second Palmer film, "Funeral in Berlin", but the third, "Billion Dollar Brain", is much closer to the Bond-type spy movie than is "The Ipcress File".
The most Bond-like element in the film is the villain, General Midwinter, a Texan oil millionaire who, with his grandiose schemes and his own private army, bears a close resemblance to some of Ian Fleming's characters such as Goldfinger or Stromberg.When the film begins, Palmer has left MI5 and is working as a freelance private investigator.
The Brain has calculated (on the basis of false information fed in by a corrupt agent who has been syphoning off Midwinter's funds) that an anti-Soviet uprising is about to occur in Latvia, and Midwinter is resolved to send his private army to intervene.Some people have seen parallels with George W Bush, but in 1967 there was another Texan in the White House, a man who had led America into a war even bloodier and even less popular than Iraq, and the character of Midwinter was doubtless intended to reflect the view that President Johnson was a dangerous warmonger.
Stok is played by Oskar Homolka who was presumably cast because of his strong resemblance to the then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.This world view- Americans are mad and bad, the Soviets are decent and civilised, and anyone who opposes Communism or Russian domination of Eastern Europe must be a Neo-Nazi- was an unusual one to find in a Cold War thriller, but it was one that was fairly common in left-wing circles in Europe during the sixties, even though the Soviets had plenty of self-righteous lunatics of their own, many of them in positions of high authority.
Had the likes of Brezhnev and Stok still been in charge they would have turned half a continent into a bloodbath in an attempt to maintain Soviet power by force of arms.The film was directed by Ken Russell, not a name normally associated with spy movies.
Caine is too downbeat- he clearly failed to realise that this style of film called for a different style of acting from "The Ipcress File"- but Karl Malden is good as the cynical, amoral Leo Newbigen, and Ed Begley makes the best Bond villain not actually found in a Bond movie.
Harry suspects everything is not as it seems and investigates further  only to find that he has stumbled into the middle of something big; a finding given greater validity by Ross kidnapping him and ordering him to infiltrate Newbigen's group and get to the bottom of a plot to bring down communism in Russia with the aid of a billion dollar supercomputer.Having watched Tommy earlier the same day, I thought I was pushing my luck by watching two Ken Russell films in the same day  surely I would hate at least one as a result of his excessive 'flair'?
Madden and Homolka both give very good support as Leo and Stok respectively, but the film is stolen at times by a wonderful performance from Ed Begley who manages to be both OTT and spot on at the same time!Overall this is a good spy that starts in the realm of Ipcress File but ends up trying to be a sort of Bond-lite!
Michael Caine and Karl Malden clearly had fun playing off each other in their scenes, it's just too bad that they weren't doing a better movie.This was Ken Russell's first theatrical film.
Any film that gets the widescreen treatment at the moment is usually one held in high regard and BDB is certainly worthy.The third in the Harry Palmer trio of spy movies, BDB is a "tour do force" of imagery, sound and acting talent.
With the patriotic and self-righteous lunatic Gen. Midwinter, Ed Begley, leading the charge.Being recruited back into the MI5 British Itellengenc service former UK spy Harry Palmer, Michael Caine,is given his next assignment, via special delivery mail and a strange telephone call,to go to Helsinki Finland with a sealed thermos.
BILLON DOLLAR BRAIN features a rabid anti communist meglomaniac in the role of villain General Midwinter and it`s up to British agent Harry Palmer to stop his lunatic scheme I wonder how many people at the time realised the irony of rabid right winger Midwinter being portrayed as a looney villain ?
It`s also good to see a movie making a nod towards the sacrifice of nearly 30 million Soviet citizens lives during the second world war , many of them being murdered by nationalists from puppet regimes created by the Nazis .I think this is undoubtedly the best of the Harry Palmer movies , helped in no small part by Ken Russell`s not quite mainstream , not quite art house direction .
Sounds familiar?The saving graces of this film are Ken Russell's keen eye and stylistic direction, the way the script stays true to Harry's character, Richard Rodney Bennet's fantastic score (utilizing the ondes martenot, i believe) and the performances, which deserve credit all down the line.
From Michael Caine's superb recreation of Palmer, Karl Malden lending strong support, Ed Begley's over the top turn as Midwinter, Oskar Homolka (again) as Stok, and Françoise Dorleac's seductive turn in what would be her final film, they all elevate the film from being some kind of sub-007 rip off.
As an admirer of the first two films THE IPCRESS FILE and FUNERAL IN BERLIN featuring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, I was excited to finally get a copy (pan and scan, with Spanish subtitles)of the obscure third entry in the series BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN, which also was the breakthrough film (in the US at least) for director Ken Russell, who'd worked primarily in British TV before this.
Begley (and I blame both the script AND the direction here, not Begley, as he had been a subtle and nuanced actor elsewhere--surely Russell was egging him on to play the character so broadly) is not "real" for a minute in this role, and thus the threat he poses both to the hero and to the world for that matter was never taken seriously by me, leading to a lack of suspense, even though there was a lot of action and intrigue and narrow escapes, and the film was fun to watch.
You can look upon Billion Dollar Brain as either a Cold War Spy drama, with Michael Caine or as a Ken Russell movie.
Combining the sardonic dark irony of the bespectacled Palmer with frozen landscapes of the communist North (filmed in Finland) plus some familiar faces - Karl Marlden in particular, it's a steady recipe that shows Ken could turn his hand to such and curb his excesses if he needed/wanted to.Whilst some of it seems horribly dated (the opening computer scenes seem like museum relics now, showing just how far this technology has changed in the last 45 years) the print of this MGM DVD is crisp and clean and widescreen.
Oscar Homolka as the Soviet Col. Stok may seem very stereotyped but is good fun as he relishes in greeting Palmer as "English!!" Others will enjoy seeing Catherine Deneuve's sister Françoise Dorléac in her last film before she was killed in a car accident.
This was the third and final Harry Palmer spy film, following "The IPCRESS File" (1965) and "Funeral in Berlin" (1966), based on Len Deighton's popular novels, Palmer had been pitched as an anti-James Bond.
Yet after the dour realities of the previous two films, which are closer to le Carré than Ian Fleming, Russell makes a spy film that is as much a parody of the genre as it is a thriller.Caine looks consistently bemused by the intrigues and betrayals after encountering his old friend Leo Newbigen (an excellent Karl Malden who conveys his character's unease and unreliability).
I haven't seen the intervening film "Funeral In Berlin" in the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer Len Deighton trilogy of mid-60's British spy-thrillers and so came to "Billion Dollar Brain" via "The Ipcress File" which I have seen and enjoyed.
I was intrigued to learn that it was an early directorial outing for infant-terrible Ken Russell and it was certainly interesting to see what flair he could bring to a typical, almost mundane "Cold War" spy narrative.To be fair though, I found the whole movie pretty under-powering, not helped by a plot that seems to borrow more from the escapist world of James Bond than the workaday environs of Harry Palmer, I mean a deranged billionaire Commie-hating Southern US General with a private army and super computer planning to trigger a war by invading Latvia!
I'm aware that Bond producer Cubby Broccoli was also producer on the Palmer films but believe he seriously got his wires crossed here, to the extent that we get a flashy Bond-type title sequence, tons and tons of expensive-looking military hardware (apart from the "cheap-as-chips" afore-mentioned super computer!) and a horde of extras who reach an icy end on the frozen wastes of Latvia.Contained in the over-prolix story are the usual devices of our man's anti-Establishment cussedness, cross and double-cross, love interest and the usual hero-saves-the-day conclusion, but in truth, rather like the snowy landscapes which proliferate in the background, I was left pretty cold and dreary by the film as a whole.Caine seems to show less conviction in his acting this time around and for me his style doesn't bond with Karl Malden's either, while Ed Begley goes over the top of Everest as the mad General Midwinter.
Director Russell handles his locations well, gives us one or two interesting shots, like the initial scene where we get to see by torch-light the dishevelment of P.I. Harry's shambolic office and a scene where a just beaten-up Palmer comes around amongst a score of others like him, like so many broken dolls and yes, I did smile at the mild nudity scene which prefigures "Women In Love" by a few years.But as I said though, it takes a long time to get to the end, there's never really any sense of danger or suspense at any time and for me the actors all look confused throughout.
Michael Caine as Harry Palmer comes up against the "Billion Dollar Brain" in this 1967 film also starring Karl Malden, Oscar Homolka, Francoise Dorleac and Ed Begley, directed by Ken Russell.Harry is dragged back into MI-5, this time to get biological warfare out of the hands of the enemy.
The finale is fantastic.It's all completely insane and yet futuristic - the biological warfare, the bad intelligence, the Texas warmonger - let's face it, you could have those elements in a film today and they would all seem pretty timely.The anchor for all this madness is Michael Caine, whose underplayed Harry is laid back as he tries to figure out who's working for whom.
Caine gives his customarily excellent performance and is given good support by Karl Malden and Françoise Dorleac (who was never better than she is here and had a great future ahead of her which was tragically cut short by the car accident just after she finished making this film.
From what I heard before I saw "Billion Dollar Brain", I expected it to be worse than Caine's other two outings as Harry Palmer in "Funeral in Berlin" and "The Ipcress File" but I was pleasantly surprised as BDB is at least the equal of these two.
Caine excells, as always, in the role of British secret agent Harry Palmer who is trying to stop a mad American millionaire from starting a war with Russia.
In the third film of my Harry Palmer weekend, 1967's "Billion Dollar Brain," which I HAD seen a few times before, Cockney thief turned secret agent Harry, played once again by Michael Caine, has left the Secret Service and is operating as a private detective.
Harry Palmer has left the British Secret Service and become a private detective.He has to deliver a thermos flask to an old friend in Helsinki.Soon he finds that he has entered the world of a Texas billionaire who thinks he can bring about a popular uprising in the Soviet Union with a help of a sophisticated computer.Billion Dollar Brain (1967) is directed by Ken Russell.It's based on Len Deighton's novel.This is the third of the Harry Palmer movies.Michael Caine was born to play this part.Karl Malden is terrific as Leo Newbigen.Francoise Dorleac does good job as Anya.It's pretty enjoyable to watch the over the top performance of Ed Begley.Guy Doleman plays the part of Colonel Ross and Oskar Homolka is Colonel Stok.In a small part we see Donald Sutherland playing a Scientist at computer.Also Åke Lindman and Pirkko Mannola are seen in the movie.Åke gets to use the machine gun.The movie is interesting for me mostly because it was mostly shot in Finland.It's pretty great to watch Finland as it was then.Also the the moments taking place in Riga were actually shot in Porvoo.There are some nice moments in this film.The first time we see Malden when he is in the sauna.Very Finnish.It get even better when Anya joins him there.The ice breaking under those vehicles is pretty amazing.For Finns this is almost a must-see..
Former British Secret Service agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine ) now a private investigator is given a package to deliver to a man in Helsinki.
Palmer's rumpled incertitude partially works due to the first half of the films convoluted structure but when dealing with a powerful megalomaniac with weapons of mass destruction in the latter third it becomes strictly a job for 007.Billion Dollar Brain's biggest misstep however is Ken Russell's direction.
Billion Dollar Brain is an excellent film, and one you seldom hear about, with the likes of Alfie and The Italian Job (the right version) hogging all the attention given to Michael Cain's 60s output.A lot of people i know can't stand this film, say it's too quirky and jokey, but i have to say that that's part of the charm.
Given that one of the main characters is a crazy Texan Billionaire intent on fermenting war to further his crazy right wing ideas.Have the Bush family ever seen this movie?The film is witty and smart and Michael Caine is excellent as usual and the supporting cast are all good too.
Michael Caine reprises his role as Harry Palmer in Billion Dollar Brain, two years after The Ipcress File.
Caine puts in another understated and accomplished turn as Harry Palmer, the anti-Bond of the age (though I love Bond films too).Two moments I particularly liked were the crazy General and his followers burning pictures and whipping themselves up into a frenzy as the camera swirls dizzily around them and close to the end where the beautiful Russian wants to kiss Palmer as if everything is alright, just because she is so gorgeous, but he spurns her brilliantly.The books are excellent too, by the way; pity even more Len Deighton works have not been made into films, though in fact a reasonable number have..
Here was a man,you felt,that if you ever got picked up for spying behind the iron curtain,you'd want to walk into your cell and say "Well,English, I think we can do business,you and I".Mr Oscar Homolka plays Stok and invests him with half a century of portraying human frailty,wisdom,cynicism and all the contradictions that go to make up a real person.His performance is my abiding memory of "The Billion Dollar Brain".It would appear that the heart of the director Mr Ken Russell wasn't really in this project,but I can't believe he didn't enjoy letting Mr Homolka have his head.
BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN is the third in the Harry Palmer trilogy of spy movies and a far drop in quality from the excellent first in the series, THE IPCRESS FILE.
While many people may not like this film as much as the previous two Harry Palmer outings, Billion Dollar Brain is far more entertaining than the two 1967 Bond films.
Harry Palmer is a character played by Michael Caine who is very much unlike James Bond.
A bespectacled Michael Caine reprises his role as dead-pan, sarcastic, blue-collar, Cockney-voiced, British M.I. 5 Agent Harry Palmer in "Women In Love" director Ken Russell's "The Billion Dollar Brain," the third in the original trilogy of Palmer movies based on bestselling author Len Deighton's imaginative espionage yarns about a secret name whose name is never revealed.Universal Studios released the first Palmer thriller "The Ipcress File" (1965), a realistic, thinking man's spy movie about a kidnapped English scientist, and James Bond producer Harry Saltzman produced it with Canadian director Sidney Furie at the helm.
The irony in this Cold War spy thriller is that the Russkies provide our hero with more help than his own people.Harry Palmer has left M.I. 5 and dictatorial Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman of "The Ipcress File" & "Funeral in Berlin") to languish in debt at his own detective agency.
Meaning, we don't get to see Harry do anything like he did in the first Palmer movie that differentiated him from James Bond.Nevertheless, "The Billion Dollar Brain" is an entertaining 1960's spy thriller with a top-notch Richard Rodney Bennett piano score and a solid cast.
The most Bond-like of the Harry Palmer movies, BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN is also the most fun.