Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) has finally left her Majesty's employ and is now working as one of those archetypal hard-boiled detectives. Well, as hard-boiled as one can get when one's filing cabinets contain cornflakes instead of liquor.
His old boss Colonel Ross (still Guy Doleman) would very much like to take Harry back into the fold, but the ex-agent has developed a certain distaste for the work, what with all the killing and doublecrossing. So it comes as a nice food-providing opportunity when a 60s computer voice phones him with instructions (and the promise of 400 pounds) for a little milk run into Finland. Why exactly someone would want a thermos bottle full of eggs delivered at this expense by someone like Harry is anybody's guess. Once in the land of vodka and high suicide rates, the Brit is a little surprised that the delivery goes to a hideously overacting woman called Anya (Francoise Dorleac) who's coming on to Harry as soon as she spots him and a certain Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden), an old acquaintance from Harry's time as a spy.
Leo makes Harry the financially very attractive proposition of working for him, supposedly without any catches and even without corpses. This turns out to be far from the truth, yet Harry won't have much of a choicethan to agree to Leo's proposition after Colonel Ross has found a nice angle to get him back into his employ.
So the poor beleagered Mister Palmer infiltrates the organization his old friend is working for. In the course of his investigation, he'll meet its founder and leader, General Midwinter (Ed Begley), a Texan oil millionaire with all the fascist anti-communist capitalist evangelical madmen rethoric one would expect of someone of this type - when one is as European as Palmer, director Ken Russell, or me, that is. Also on his list of new acquaintances will be the Latvian revolutionary army (all six members of it), much fun 60s computer technology, an ex-nazi "scientist" and a scoop of chicks. People will also have the strange tendency to undress to their underwear in front of Harry, a proposition that is less than attractive when you keep Karl Malden and the return of Oscar Homolka's Colonel Stok in mind...
Billion Dollar Brain certainly is a change of pace after the first two Harry Palmer outings. Gone are any and all pretenses of realism or plot coherence of the more normal style. Your enjoyment of the film will probably hinge on two things: your willingness to make yourself at ease with a film of a completely different style than the first two of the trilogy had, and your opinion of director Ken Russell and his work. One can't say Russell isn't trying to reign his love for near-schizophrenic changes of tone, bombast and the least subtle visual metaphors this side of Eisenstein in a little; in comparison to some other Eurospy films Billion Dollar Brain looks downright reserved most of the time.
It is a very weird film nonetheless, at times consciously subverting the conventions of the spy film - for example by using Finland and Texas aka two of the least glamorous places on Earth as its main locations, or through the nature of its Big Bad - at others just playing along with them while giving them a spin into the surreal, and (this being a Ken Russell film) determined to show us at least drawn naked women if it isn't allowed to show us naked actresses.
This of course makes for a film that's a lot more interesting than thrilling which keeps with the talents of Russell who was much, but certainly no action director. The only weak point for those of us who can take the film as it wants to be taken should be the Grand Finale when Russell can't escape filming something that amounts to an action scene and only succeeds in presenting the viewer with a loud, metaphorically overheated chain of pictures that are as soon forgotten as they are seen, as loud and empty as what a Jerry Bruckheimer film would present today, and not much better for trying so hard to be meaningful. Some could also be troubled by the blunt and unsubtle way General Midwinter is portrayed, but I think in making fun of right-wingers unsubtle satire can be a useful tool; it's difficult to talk subtle of the unsubtle.
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2 comments:
I think this is movie is only a little bit weird, until you put that music into the soundtrack, then it becomes really weird.
My favorite part: the fact that Harry constantly gets stuck having to walk back home from wherever he is, even if it's the middle of the Finnish countryside or the Russian frontier. Poor guy. Talk about a notable lack of glamour!
Holy crap -- the word verification I have to type in: morfopod! Sci-Fi Channel has its next movie monster.
I somehow started to picture him walking from the Russian border to London (the ocean's obviously frozen).
I don't know - morphopod sounds more like a vehicle to me. The next type of teenage-piloted robot, perhaps.
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