The third of the 1960s film adaptations of Len Deighton's espionage novels to star Michael Caine, Billion Dollar Brain was also the most problematic of the three, mostly owing to John McGrath's script and Ken Russell's direction. The two previous movies, The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), were fairly straightforward spy yarns that, for all of their inventiveness, followed stories and story arcs that could be understood without any real trouble, steeped as they were in the Cold War politics of the day. Billion Dollar Brain has its topical aspect -- the character of General Midwinter (Ed Begley Sr.) is a kind of cinematic burlesque/composite of Texas oil millionaire H.L. Hunt and ex-Major General Edwin Walker (though what Begley brings to the role, especially when he is speechifying about communism, is likely very close to what he did as Matthew Harrison Brady in +Inherit the Wind on-stage -- and on that basis alone, the movie is worth seeing). But the story is also very much a deconstruction of Cold War politics as they were understood up to that time, especially among movie audiences. The script, like the book, reverses much of what people thought they knew and understood about relations between the West and the Soviets; in fact, this book was really an early setup for the revelation contained in Deighton's Spy Story, in which negotiations intended to free East Germany from the Soviet bloc are sabotaged by the NATO countries themselves. Russell seems bent on giving the audience as little information and guidance as possible as he takes us on a breathless chase from a seedy section of London to Heathrow Airport on a rocky ride, and then into Helsinki and then to Latvia and to Texas; and we end up nearly as dizzy and confused as Harry Palmer.
Although much of the plot finally becomes clear, as Harry realizes that he's been made a sucker by more than one party in this picture, the effect of the pacing and the very thin narrative is cold and off-putting. There is no emotional center to the movie, mostly because Caine's Harry Palmer is so remote a presence here and so far from being the audience's proper intellectual stand-in. In addition, Richard Rodney Bennett's score, although memorable and highly inventive, often only reinforces the emotional coldness of the film. That said, that same emotional distance was an element of Deighton's book, as well, so Russell may have gotten exactly what he and McGrath were looking for in the adaptation. And on the plus side, Billy Williams' cinematography keeps almost everything good -- even great -- to look at (except, oddly enough, Françoise Dorléac, who looks older than her older sister Catherine Deneuve, and almost haggard at times in this movie). There are also some beautifully devised scenes: the rally and bonfire at Midwinter's compound (one suspects that Russell saw the news footage of bonfires of Beatles albums in the Deep South, over John Lennon's Jesus remark, from the year before), the whole section of the movie inside the brain and Midwinter's command center; all of the Helsinki material; and the final section of the film, a parody of the Battle on the Ice from Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, which even utilizes a section of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in its opening. And Karl Malden makes for a suitably wily villain, while Begley and Oskar Homolka almost steal the picture in every scene that each of them is in, playing the only characters that are likely to resonate at all with the audience. Ultimately, the movie is a wild ride, and also reflective of its time as a cerebral piece of what might be called "mod" cinema (complete with a Beatles allusion that had to be cut from the home-video version); but it's no Ipcress File, and, given its story and its director's approach, never could be.