I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

1967 was a bad year for British Cinema. As if Casino Royale wasn't ludicrous enough, Ken Russel made this clunker his debut on the big screen. In their heyday, cinemas used to hand out cardboard face masks with red and green lenses; alas in 1967 there were no usherettes issuing clothespins that the hapless audiences could clip on their noses. Speaking of noses, one of the film's saving graces was the miscasting of Karl Malden with that hilarious nose with a tip shaped like a woman's butt, Malden was the only actor who could make Jimmy Durante look handsome. Having never had the misfortune of reading Len Deighton's novel, I'm not sure whether to blame him or John McGrath for the awful script. However often producers rely on an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, facts are still facts. YOU CAN'T BREED DEADLY VIRUSES OUTSIDE A HUMAN HOST, CERTAINLY NOT IN EGGS OR PETRI DISHES. The film's other saving grace is the casting of Ed Begley as Gen. Midwinter, an over-the-top demagogue, who seems to be a hybrid of Barry Goldwater and H. Ross Perot with a generous dash of T. Boone Pickens. LOL

"Billion Dollar Brain" (1967), directed by the iconoclastic Ken Russell, in the 1970s a firebrand of British cinema. This was the third and final Harry Palmer spy film, following "The IPCRESS File" (1965) and "Funeral in Berlin" (1966), based on Len Deighton's popular novels, Palmer had been pitched as an anti-James Bond. Michael Caine as the bespectacled and cockney hero was certainly far away from the suave glamour of Sean Connery's Bond movies and seemed to inhabit a recognisable Swinging Sixties London. Yet after the dour realities of the previous two films, which are closer to le Carré than Ian Fleming, Russell makes a spy film that is as much a parody of the genre as it is a thriller.Caine looks consistently bemused by the intrigues and betrayals after encountering his old friend Leo Newbigen (an excellent Karl Malden who conveys his character's unease and unreliability). Once Midwinter's plot emerges (Ed Begley who overacts outrageously), the entire facade of the film threatens to crumble. Russell constantly undercuts our expectations: the Soviet authorities, represented by a faintly ridiculous Oskar Homolka, are seen as essentially reasonable and as keen as MI5 to avert World War Three, while Midwinter's base, run by a giant computer that is coordinating his plan, is so over the top that it could be production designer Syd Cain commenting on his own work for "From Russia with Love" (1963). Russell extends the none-too-serious tone with Caine getting beaten up and knocked out more than everyone else and the entire climax is a replication of Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) ending, with its battle on a frozen lake. There's no denying the skill with which Russell directs the whole farrago, particularly the scenes with Caine stumbling across the frozen Finnish landscapes, benefiting enormously from shooting on location.Other treats are Billy William's elegant cinematography, the entire title sequence with its elaborate computer motifs and Richard Rodney Bennett's thundering, highly romantic piano score, borrowing liberally from Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, strangely fitting the action on screen and helps maintain the tension when it seems as if Russell is engaged with other tangents such as the subplot of Françoise Dorléac and her ambiguous relationship with Karl Malden. The film as a consequence, isn't brilliant, its energies dissipated by too many digressions, but "Billion Dollar Brain" still provides a lot of entertainment, partly as it playfully rejects so many of the clichés of the genre that it's nominally a part of.

You can look upon Billion Dollar Brain as either a Cold War Spy drama, with Michael Caine or as a Ken Russell movie. Or both...I bought it as the latter as I'm trying to get all his films, on discovering some of his odder and, shall we say, more florid films.I was under no illusion, though - B.D.B has been on early hours TV many times and I've always had a quiet interest in the Harry Palmer character, rather than an infatuation, so I had seen it before. So, this DVD was a cheap (compared to scarcer Russell's) way of re-acquainting myself with Russell's take on a standard spy drama.Taken as such, it certainly passes muster - if it's the arty, OTT creativity of our Ken you're after, you've got the wrong film. Combining the sardonic dark irony of the bespectacled Palmer with frozen landscapes of the communist North (filmed in Finland) plus some familiar faces - Karl Marlden in particular, it's a steady recipe that shows Ken could turn his hand to such and curb his excesses if he needed/wanted to.Whilst some of it seems horribly dated (the opening computer scenes seem like museum relics now, showing just how far this technology has changed in the last 45 years) the print of this MGM DVD is crisp and clean and widescreen. Versions on TV tended to have been on commercial channels where quality has been poor and ad-breaks frequent, making this a nice change to watch it properly.The plot (crank Texan Ed Begley about to start a new Russian Revolution, to kill off Communism, aided by a super-computer, the 'Brain') is obviously daft and contrived and very 007, especially in these days of hindsight but if nothing more, it's a great travelogue, aided by Ken's eye for detail and composition. Oscar Homolka as the Soviet Col. Stok may seem very stereotyped but is good fun as he relishes in greeting Palmer as "English!!" Others will enjoy seeing Catherine Deneuve's sister Françoise Dorléac in her last film before she was killed in a car accident. She does indeed look very appealing wrapped in (& out!) of her furs.Donald Sutherland features as the computer 'voice', you can hear his nasal tones through the electronic distortion, once you realise it's him and there's some effective and often sinister ambient music from Richard Rodney Bennett.For all that though, the film is a bit flabby about the middle with a fair amount of chasing around through snowy forests and frozen lakes. Though at times BDD verges on Bond territory it never sustains it - and probably never should - and at 110 mins it could be a bit leaner. The budget, no doubt was a fraction of that franchise and it does show.Michael Caine is, always, perfect and overall, whilst not in either his top ten films, nor Russell's, for that matter, it remains good Cold War spy drama fodder.

More like a 5-cent brain. A pathologically paranoid computer that orders the killing of just about everyone in the movie runs an organization so powerful it almost starts WWIII. Yup, that's how dumb this crap is. One would think that a "superior" mechanical thinking device would make half-way rational decisions; instead, this hunk of metal junk proves to be more bloodthirsty than a gulag operator.The inclusion of Stock, the jovial old Communist from the previous film, was a telling sign. The producers/writers of the HP series were Communist sympathizers, or at least quite sympathetic to the touching plight of the pro-life pacifistic Marxist cause, i.e. childishly naïve about the Soviet Union and its inner workings. Presenting this Russian character as a likable jolly old man is about as twisted as it gets.To Deighton, the closet Marxist who wrote the book, a top Russian military guy is the voice of reason, truth and and a moral compass for the viewer, while a Texas millionaire (representing capitalism - so unsubtle is this Deighton) represents evil, stupidity, aggression and madness. Wow. What drugs was this "Das Kapital"-hugging nincompoop on? Stock tells Caine that it's absurd to believe that the people of Latvia are hoping to get rid off Soviet presence - and THIS is presented to the audience as the voice of reason! Amazing stuff. Anyone who has ever been to ANY of Soviet Union's former European colonies will know just how extremely hated the Russians were(are) there. Deighton is the stereotypical Left-wing elitist, a typical 60s dreamer with his head in the clouds and his feet firmly in the stratosphere.It is downright shameful to portray anti-Communist/anti-Soviet forces in the West as insane Christian-fundamentalist, cowboy-hat-wearing hicks. (The Texans are such daft hicks, according to BDB, that they even wear their cowboy hats in freezing Helsinki.) So obvious and unabashed is the film about its anti-American, pro-Soviet message that Begley was encouraged to give the most over-the-top, exaggerated, hence moronic performance that I have ever seen from a "heavy" in a non-comedy. At the latest with the appearance of foam at the edges of Begley's perpetually-screaming mouth does the movie totally fall apart under its own cretinous weight. It starts looking like a failed parody of a spy movie.Something tells me BDB might have been shown in over 1,000 Soviet cinemas (if they had that many) at the time of its release. In fact, if I didn't know better I'd assume that the Russians had financed it. This is blatant anti-Western propaganda.There is very little credibility in the CIA not knowing squat about Begley's secret paramilitary organization (so secret he holds rallies outside, with hundreds of people, while he screams slogans at around 120 decibels) in spite of the fact that it's financed from within the States, Texas no less (to make it more bombastic), and yet the KGB seem to even know such tiny details as whom the computer had targeted for assassination. Just one of the many far-fetched, utterly silly pieces of illogic that are scattered around this film like grains of sand on a beach.Malden receives orders to kill the girl; the girl gets orders to kill Caine; the Latvian freedom-fighter gets orders to kill Caine - and that was just in one afternoon, I believe. Frankly, it's a wonder that this oh-so dangerous organization lasted longer than a week, what with all the in-fighting/in-killing. The CIA and MI5 shouldn't have even bothered. Begley's little paramilitary formation should have eradicated themselves through inner-rank assassination within a few weeks. Perhaps the computer would have eventually even ordered its boss/owner, played so vapidly by Begley, to be killed too. So very silly.Are Texas oil millionaires really just moronic, goofy, gun-totting fools who behave like little children and shout a lot, while spit flies around them? Well, if you believe that then you must be even dumber than the left-wing putzes who wrote and produced this imbecilic flick. Let me get this straight: "the General" is a silly, dumb oaf (several characters including Caine have referred to him as "stupid") yet the CIA haven't been able to get a decent file on organization's activities? Just one of many staggeringly dumb, far-fetched aspects."The General" didn't seem to be bothered that not one but three people his dandy computer ordered to be killed were still alive, including Caine and Malden, both of whom he welcomed with open arms when they arrived to Texas. WTF? Talk about a tightly-run organization! Even its boss has no clue what's going on half the time. The writer of this silly drivel wanted to have his cake and eat it too; have a bad guy who is both intelligent and stupid, both competent and incompetent, the viewers basically being expected to flip-flop from one extreme to the other depending on the momentary needs of the plot.BDB ends with a spectacularly cartoonish, stupid, bombastic ending, with General Begley doing an impersonation of Chaplin impersonating Hitler, while he drowns in ice, as Communist Stock grins happily for having secured the Latvian people's slavery for at least another 20 years. And this is a happy ending? No wonder no Harry Palmer film had been made after this turkey, for decades. Keep in mind also that this text has only scratched the surface of all the nonsense there is here. A text-book example of how to sink a successful movie franchise.The nepotistic female lead looks crap and acts just as badly. Why couldn't have they just cast someone who isn't part of the Filmic In-Breeding Program?