'BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN'.....MIDWINTER IS COMING!

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)  continued the feature film espionage adventures of the anti-Bond, Harry Palmer. Played with perfectly calibrated deadpan dry humor by Michael Caine, Harry, the most reluctant of spies, accepted his missions only under threat of a military court martial for black marketeering held over him by his snobbish, despised superior Col Ross (Guy Doleman). Though peering at the world through thick horn-rimmed glasses and living in impoverished squalor, Harry does have a Bondian sexual appetite and and there's usually a girl just leaving his disheveled apartment in the morning.

            Based on novels by Len Deighton, Harry's first two outings, The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral In Berlin (1966) were grimly conventional spy stuff, grounded in cold war realities.  As he navigated through convoluted plots and duplicitous characters, Harry fended off adversaries more often with sarcastic asides than bullets. He would somehow triumph and come through it all alive and well, much to resigned distaste of Col. Ross.

            Sidney Furie directed 'Ipcress' with a degree of trendy visual flair while Guy Hamilton handled  'Funeral' with standard, uncluttered competence.  The next Harry Palmer mission, however, fell into the hands of the flamboyant Ken Russell, often described as either the British Felllini or the British Orson Welles.  You could debate those comparisons, but nobody could deny that Russell was like no other director, with is his taste for over-the-top storytelling, eye popping visuals and actors encouraged to hit operatically hammy heights.

              With the the third Harry Palmer, 'Billion Dollar Brain', Russell was just getting warmed up before assuming the role of the 1970's favorite cinematic wildman. A slew of unforgettable, spectacular work followed, ("Women In Love", "The Music Lovers", "The Devils", "Tommy", "The Boy Friend", "Altered States", "Lair Of The White Worm") Russell and his movies  outraged critics, but galvanized audiences. As a director, he embraced the Crazy like a long lost lover......and nobody could ignore him. You wouldn't dare miss a Russell extravaganza any more than you would speed past a colossal traffic accident.....everyone had to stop and take a look.

              "Billion Dollar Brain", under Russell's command, freely mixes up the cynical,  emotionally chilly tone of the first two films with the loony-toon spectacle of the James Bond films. For the first time, Harry Palmer's given a first row seat for the Cold War....a Cold War taken by Russell to literal, ridiculously ironic extremes.

                The film sends Harry off to the Soviet Union in search of an old frenemy, Leo Newbigin (Karl Malden). Leo,a  pathological double-crosser and scammer, has a new patsy he's bilking for millions.....an insane Texas oil magnate, General Midwinter (Ed Begley), who plans to overthrow the commies by invading Latvia with his own private army. Midwinter thinks Leo's recruiting bunches of insurgents to pave the way for this holy invasion, but Leo's been  busy using the Texan's supercomputer (the 'Brain' of the title) to pad the payroll and his own bank account by hiring purely fictitious spies.

                  Harry spills it all to the raging, mad-as-a-Texas-Hatter Midwinter.  ("My reach is long and my vengeance is total!" shrieks Ed Begley, playing Midwinter like an asylum escapee who stumbled into a production of 'Inherit The Wind')  Distrustful as well as demented, Midwinter drags Harry along as a draftee in his glorious crusade to liberate Latvia and topple the Soviet Union.

               And Russell-Mania grandly erupts as Midwinter and his hordes of Texan commandos race across a frozen Latvian lake in tanker trucks and snowmobiles.  Unfortunately for these guys,none of them ever watched  the final sequence of Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky"........but Ken Russell sure did. Enough said.

               Before Russell unleashes icy hell on almost the entire cast, there's plenty of nutty goodness to savor.....Harry waking up in a pile of corpses, a visit to Midwinter's Texas headquarters, rife with patriotic hoe-downs and barbecues......and a return, from "Funeral In Berlin", of another favorite Harry frenemy, the wily, slippery Russian Colonel Stok, played with a lifetime of leering slyness by Oscar Homolka at his Homolk-iest.  (One big regret here.....in all of the script's gallows repartee, they should have included, directly from Len Deighton's book, Col. Stok's succinct, final word on this caper....."There's only one General Midwinter......and he's on our side.")

               The BQ doesn't care how others have harshly judged Ken Russell.....or this movie, for that matter. We love how he bent this well worn genre to his will....taking Harry Palmer out of the ordinary grungy spy-land and dropping him down the rabbit hole of Ken-World. For "Billion Dollar Brain", we'll sneakily affix to micro-dots 4 stars (****).