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"Billion Dollar Brain", Dir: Ken Russell, 1967

Ravi Swami

Amazon Prime have added Ken Russell's 1967 film "Billion Dollar Brain", the third film in a "Harry Palmer" Cold War espionage series starring Michael Caine, the first of which was "The Ipcress File", and adapted from books by Len Deighton, to their line-up and I am led to wonder if the timing is deliberate as a certain individual is elected to be the president of the United States.


Broadly speaking the films were intended to be a contrast to the more often fantastical adventures of Ian Fleming's "James Bond" in film, a character that owed more to the earlier template of patriotic two-fisted British heroes like "Bulldog Drummond" and Caine plays Harry Palmer as a somewhat cynical and more down-to-earth hero navigating Cold War "realpolitik" where the lines between good and bad are blurred and there is an absence of obviously stereotyped villains hell-bent on world domination, like "Fu Manchu" etc. "Billion Dollar Brain" did however mark the end of a 3 film cycle, the middle film being "Funeral in Berlin", that I have yet to watch, and it does rather slide into James Bond territory by featuring a self-made power-crazed villain, in this case a fascistic American oil baron supported by a supercomputer housed in an undergound bunker and a private army that he has martialed in order to take down the enemy, Russia, or any other foreign power perceived as a threat to the United States.


One thing that doesn't change throughout the 3 films is Michael Caine's depiction of "Harry Palmer" as an acerbic Cockney drafted into MI5 in order to carry out espionage and protect Britain's interests and the film opens after Palmer has been ejected from the organisation and is now working as a private gumshoe in seedy London lodgings, which is where he receives strange automated instructions by telephone via a synthesised voice that commands him to conduct a mission on behalf of his previous employers with the promise of a handsome payout. It's a mission that requires him to travel to Helsinki, Finland in the middle of a bitterly cold winter and to rendezvous with a mysterious woman, an ice-cold blonde played by Françoise Dorléac (sister of Catherine Deneuve) in what was to be her last film role before a tragic motor accident robbed cinema of a promising talent, as evidenced in films like Jacques Demy's "Les Demoiselles De Rochefort".


To go into too much detail over the labyrinthine plot would spoil the film but the most interesting aspects about the film are the central idea of a supercomputer that issues automated orders for various espionage operatives and that anticipates the current preoccupation with and fears concerning artificial intelligence (AI), and the film's villain, the American oil baron who organises rallies under a banner that has echoes of Nazi insignia and rants about how he intends to make America great again and the threat posed by Communism. Michael Caine has all the best lines and he is cast opposite some American film heavyweights like Karl Malden and Ed Begley, a move perhaps partly intended to give the "Harry Palmer" films a more international, ie American, appeal and to shift the geographic bias away from the U.K and Europe. In an early scene set in a Finnish sauna where Malden's dodgy double agent "Leo Newbigen" and Dorléac's "Anya" strip off as per the Finnish custom as Caine's "Harry Palmer" reluctantly does the same when he is invited to join them, he is asked if he'd like to have a drink, to which he replies "I'll have a cup of tea, thanks.."..:) The very prescient themes in the film make it a must-see and suggests that very little has changed since it was made and if anything it anticipates many things that are playing out in the present - for example, Ed Begley's fanatical, foaming-at-the-mouth, paranoid millionaire industrialist "General Midwinter" with his crackpot ambitions bears an uncanny and disturbing resemblance to a certain individual who is stepping into The White House on a second term.


*As a footnote, Richard Rodney Bennett's haunting "Anya's Theme" played on an Ondes Martenot, an early type of electronic synthesiser, adds a suitably futuristic tone to underline the plot's technological slant.


"Billion Dollar Brain", Dir: Ken Russell, 1967

Amazon Prime

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