Billion Dollar Brain. 1967. UK. Directed by Ken Russell. Screenplay by John McGrath, based on the novel by Len Deighton. With Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Ed Begley. 16mm. 111 min.
The third of the Harry Palmer spy thrillers brought Michael Caine together with Ken Russell, a director then principally known for his BBC films on classical music composers. An over-the-top caper about a megalomaniacal oilman (Ed Begley) bent on world domination using a supercomputer the size of El Paso, Billion Dollar Brain is, in Caine’s estimation, “a really atmospheric and underrated picture.” Russell fondly admitted to ripping off the Battle on the Ice sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky for his own climatic episode on a Finnish ice floe, noting that “the script was totally incomprehensible, of course, but quite stunning in parts—particularly the Midwinter sections. [It] gradually became more and more anti-American and pro-Russian, in that the film deals with American interference in affairs which are not its concern. In this case it’s Latvia whose internal politics are interfered with, but for ‘Latvia’ one could easily read Vietnam. I think it was the first anti-American spy film ever and I’m told that many young people in America liked it for that reason, though it died the death in most places.”