• U.S.

Cinema: Billion Dollar Brain

2 minute read
TIME

Harry Palmer, the bland antiheroic secret agent of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, the chap who hates his job and doesn’t care what kind of dry vermouth they put in his martinis, is back with his spectacles and his non-U English accent in Billion Dollar Brain. So is Michael Caine to play him in yet another thriller by Novelist Len Deighton. But in this third outing the law of diminishing returns has begun catching up with the team.

Palmer has finally got away from Colonel Ross, his deadpan boss in M.I.5, and is now operating a seedy, one-man detective agency on his own. Suddenly a mysterious envelope arrives with £ 200 and a locker key, followed by a phone call from a stentorian computer instructing him to deliver the parcel that he will find in a London airport locker to a Dr. Kaarna in Helsinki. The package, Palmer soon discovers, contains deadly, virus-infected eggs.

In Helsinki, Palmer and the eggs get themselves scrambled with a beautiful blonde spy (the late Françoise Dorléac) who is cooling it in red fox, and a jolly American spy (Karl Malden), who is sweating it in a sauna bath. Both of them are working for General Midwinter, a mad Texas multimillionaire (Ed Begley), who is operating a private CIA against Russia, coordinated by a giant walk-in computer complex—the billion-dollar brain.

With all sorts of plot twists borrowed from Dr. Strangelove and the Bond movies, Brain is the sort of film that more or less writes itself. By the time that Oscar Homolka, as the genial head of Russia’s secret service, stops Midwinter’s army cold, viewers may decide that the whole thing is mechanical enough to have been turned out by a computer—and one that is worth a lot less than a billion dollars.

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