Ah yes, sorry about that, enthusiasm, see. Mind you, the chapter where 'Palmer' learns this term is another episode that drags the narrative out, a day / night trip to a specialist's cottage in North Wales. The whole scene could have been done in London.
Unlike my readings of Len Deighton’s previous two ‘Harry Palmer’ novels, I declined to refer to the appendices while reading the narrative, although I did glance quickly at the page notes when given. This, I felt, might prevent me from being annoyed by them. It did. Instead I was annoyed by other things. My Harper’s copy from 2009 features a long introduction from Deighton explaining how Berlin became [in his words] ‘a second home’ after meeting the director Kurt Jung Alsen at the National Film Theatre in London following a showing of his film The Story of Private Pooley. Deighton subsequently went to visit Alsen in East Berlin. I mention this because Private Pooley was made in 1961, and Deighton does mention the Wall being put up, but given Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, its events take place in late 1963 and Deighton had written and published two novels in this period, I query this ‘a second home’ reference. I can understand being obsessed with a city, especially if one is researching, but that description seems far too endearing. It doesn’t help matters that the action of the book only resides in Berlin for half its time. The rest of the book is spent in France, Prague and a dreary London, mostly in offices and on telephones and with hardly an ounce of interest from page-to-page.
Dreary describes it well. Funeral in Berlin is about as cold a yarn as a Cold War yard gets. It is frozen. Inexplicably dull, the novel isn’t helped by a plot so maze like you need a map to unravel it. Characters appear from the hedgerows as you turn corners, or pages, and incidents that cry out for some sort of excitement fizzle away to nothing. The climax takes place on derelict ground in London on Bonfire Night with ‘Palmer’ chucking fireworks about while his homosexual agitator tries to gun him down. The stuff in Berlin finished chapters before. The whole exercise is a tawdry experience. Ex-Nazi’s hide in plain sight in Germany and Spain, corrupt British officials pull invisible strings across the continent, Israeli secret service agents seek a super-dooper agricultural fertilizer [yes, really] and the Russians pull better strings than the British. The Americans dip their oar in the mustard in the form of Harvey Newbegin [not Leo as in the film Billion Dollar Brain, his role in this book is so insignificant despite pages and pages devoted to him, that the screen writers edited him out for the cinema version]. The best sections involved the old Bolshevik Colonel Stok, who at least felt real, read real and talked real. Everyone else seems to be acting like someone else and sounding like it, from Johnnie Vulkan’s crooked German to Samantha Steel’s deceptive Jew, to Hallum’s fortune seeker to ‘Harry Palmer’ himself, pulling the metaphorical wool over everyone’s eyes.
Deighton gives us all that detail we have already come to recognise as his forte: the rain rolling off Vulkan’s face onto his shoes, Hallum’s cats, Stok’s toes picking up coal-pokers, Alice chain-smoking, Dawlish’s weeds, Jean and her irrepressible haircuts. Deighton takes us away from his lead character occasionally to offer goblets of insight into the other main players, reverting to a third person narrative each time, but the brief respite from ‘Harry’s know-it-all dialogue and description doesn’t lighten the mood enough. Dawlish’s procrastinations and pontifications don’t help. A modicum of explanation might assist, but there isn’t any. Sometimes I felt as if ‘Harry Palmer’ was being deliberately obscure simply so he [by which I mean Len Deighton] could prove how obtuse the rest of the cast [by which I mean us] truly are; in his mind at any rate. The whole thing is as dense as a rock cake and quite as indigestible. Maybe I am missing the charm of a truly Cold War, but the novel felt curiously irrelevant, as if the plan and its execution and the people around it had no bearing on history or even on ‘Harry Palmer’ who remains as untouched by events as the rain soaked newspaper he spies on the street at the novel’s end.
Berlin – a new crisis? screams the headline. ‘Palmer’ barely registers the fact, he’s too busy catching up on dreary old pre-swinging London. I consider the film adaptation of Funeral in Berlin to be the least interesting of the Harry Palmer movies, certainly the 1960s trilogy, but goodness this book was hard work.
In a second introduction, illustrator Arnold Schwartzmann explains the creative process behind his montage cover. This was more interesting than the novel which follows. Still, at least the very excellent cover goes some way to generating the landscape of Deighton’s cloaked and crooked spy world.
The plot of the movie is vastly altered and the locations effectively condensed. The film IMO does what the book should be doing, creating a tense and believable Cold War environment. FIB '66 has its good moments, just not enough of them for me. I understand why people like it. Compared to the book, it is streets ahead.
Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ escapades come to an end in familiar fashion, although not without some interest thanks mostly to a more streamlined plot. The narrative though does the usual meanderings all over the world and eventually becomes its own laconic funeral as an episode of much promise peters out into a series of head-to-heads during which Deighton’s unnamed protagonist decides that the “day of the political philosopher is over. Men no longer betray their country for an ideal; they respond to immediate problems.” ‘Palmer’ displays the same immediate instincts when protecting his country’s interests; no ideal – political or personal – will divert him from his arduous and unfathomable tasks.
Billion Dollar Brain begins effectively enough with a touch of mystery surrounding the theft of some ‘eggs’ from Portadown and ‘Palmer’s pursuit of them to Helsinki. Following the death of his contact Dr Kaarna, ‘Harry’ reacquaints himself with Harvey Newbegin, the American rascal who barely featured in Funeral in Berlin, yet appears to be a big cog in ‘Harry Palmer’s European wheel of agents. Newbegin has got ‘Harry’ and everybody on the hop, including his new squeeze Signe, his wife, Russia’s Colonel Stok, a bunch of Latvian rebels and the frankly bonkers ultra-nationalist General Midwinter. This last character has a crazy introduction in New York at a strange sub-swinging-sixties costume party packed full of people reenacting American Independence. Strange doesn’t do half the explaining. It was at this point that the novel began to go off the rails. What had been an intriguing and well-constructed tale of deceit, double cross and delectable seduction simply unravelled into a trawl of chapters designed to send one to sleep.
I exaggerate slightly, but Deighton’s incessant need to demonstrate how singularly unexciting life is for a secret agent merely makes his books unexciting as well. For half its length, Billion Dollar Brain is clever, incisive and swift. Then it just becomes boring as ‘Palmer’ travels to New York, to Texas, to London and Helsinki and Leningrad and barely a thing happens unless it comes from someone’s mouth. Dialogue drives stories – it can also kill them. Deighton seems to have forgotten that thrillers ought to be thrilling and having his hero uncover a couple of red herrings, a couple of corpses and shoving a bad guy under a bus simply isn’t enough excitement for this reader. It doesn’t help that most of the conversations are about nothing related to the central story: the virus infected eggs and how General Midwinter plans to use them to overthrow communism. In fact, I am not sure it is even hinted at; Midwinter – who is as unhinged as any great baddie should be – doesn’t even get to be the main villain. He’s sort of shuffled in and shuffled out when Deighton wants to score political points about the USA and its ill-informed anti-socialist agendas. Instead, Deighton concentrates on Harvey Newbegin, who isn’t a grand villain; he’s just a man who loves money and cheats on his wife with a teenage sexpot.
I was somewhat disconcerted by the age of the lovely Signe Laine. She claims to be “almost eighteen” and Deighton describes her as an ingenue, yet apparently she is one of Midwinter’s great assets, having eliminated three enemy agents. She wants to attempt the same on poor Harvey, but ‘Palmer’ skittles him away too fast, although she knows Harvey’s number is already up whatever the deluded lovesick American thinks. Colonel Stok watches all the proceedings with a heavy eye and a nice line in wit, which is lacking almost everywhere else.
Regards the age of characters, Deighton seems to have changed his mind over ‘Harry Palmer’. In Horse Under Water, ‘Palmer’ was described as having been involved in the Second World War. Here he tells Signe that eighteen years ago he was sitting exams, so he could be as young as 34 [GCE’s at 16] or 39 [a three year degree at 21] or he might be older if he took exams in the army. Alternatively, given ‘Palmer’ hides behind identities, he might be lying about his age also, or about his army experience – who knows? This disguise of character has advantages in terms of reinvention, but doesn’t help us empathise with anything ‘Palmer’ tells us about himself, others or the world as we begin to misunderstand what he is about, where he has come from and why he is how he is. Like Harvey Newbegin, he succumbs to the nymphet’s charms anyway, probably because it’s all in the line of duty, although he never makes that clear either.
The innovations Deighton introduced for his debut The Ipcress File – all those appendices and the neat lines about London and the life of an operative – have become old-hat in four books. The landscape hasn’t changed any for ‘Harry Palmer’. If anything, the cynicism has gone, to be replaced by doses of lethargic banter. ‘Palmer’s on-off affair with his secretary Jean is becoming a bore, especially as he keeps making love to other women as soon as he gets into the field. She is still obsessed with her hair. His boss, Dawlish, is beginning to sound like that public school bowler hatted comic strip official Sir Gerald Tarrant from Modesty Blaise; his attention to overgrown weeds and crass antiques doesn’t so much add depth as despair. The scenes where he condescends to ‘Palmer’ and ‘Palmer’ condescends back have ceased to be amusing. Here, they also go on far too long and get in the way of the story. The same could be said of the sojourn to New York. The film version sensibly transfers most of this dialogue and meeting to Texas. The weeks of in depth training ‘Palmer’ receives at Midwinter’s HQ as skimped over in favour of a dull night swapping family stories with Harvey and his wife. The fantastic titular Billion Dollar Brain hardly gets a chapter. It’s surprising how much of the novel was extracted for the movie, although not necessarily in the right order or location. Like Funeral… the movie is an improvement on the book.
The final chapters are set back in London as ‘Harry’ tries to secure safe passage for a traitor, his wife and child: a distinctly tensionless series of scenes that call into question ‘Palmer’s ethics. I mean, what are his ideals, his purpose, as a British agent? While James Bond [and others] are described as killers, men at the behest of their governments, in the bear pit of espionage, ‘Harry Palmer’ hovers around it knocking pawns off the proverbial chess board. It really is a game to him: who can be trusted, who not, how to manoeuvre someone into an unresolvable position, how to escape, where to hide, what to say or usually what not. Even when ‘Palmer’ tells us, I can’t recognise the clues and have to back track they are so unobtrusively hidden in the action – or more likely the interminable dialogues. I just want something to happen and, in the last two novels especially, nothing does in ‘Harry Palmer’s world.
It’s easy to see why Ian Fleming and James Bond were so popular when you read this kind of novel, one which makes you feel the author is determined to be pretentious, considering his work too good for his own readers. Thrillers ought to build to a climax and this one, like its immediate predecessor, does not. The impressionable first half feels like a wasted opportunity.
Previously available in the Last Film Seen... thread and reposted here.
I could spend ages comparing the book to the film, but really what would be the point? I think it sufficient to say that the novel is intriguing, but meanders too much and never delivers a knock out blow. The film meanwhile is incisive and feels important, both on a narrative level and in a cultural one. Slimming down the action and the landscapes helps immeasureably to focus our attentions. Caine is probably about the right age to play Deighton's spy - based on what he tells us in Billion Dollar Brain - but I am not convinced the novel's hero is as working class as the film makes him. Definately got a chip on his shoulder though. Worth noting as always the brilliant John Barry score, the excellent Peter Hunt editing and the riveting camera use by director Sidney J. Furie and photographer Otto Heller.
Where to start?
Michael Caine, perhaps, in a career defining role as Harry Palmer, bringing elements of schoolboy charm to a working class, slightly obnoxious, slightly sarcastic, clever, yet ever-so put-upon spy – “insubordinate, insolent, a trickster with criminal tendencies.”
John Barry’s music, perhaps, with its memorable theme played out over scenes of Palmer’s domestic life, its jazz notes swaying, a pre-Thunderball score of incidental excellence.
Sidney J. Furie’s incisive direction, perhaps, almost entirely shot from obscure angles to give us the impression we are clandestinely observing the action – from the floor, below a desk, a bed, a car, through a key hole, chicken wire, a lamp shade, a windscreen, a telephone booth, a spectacle lens, etc, etc – not only is the audience constantly off-balance, they are also prone to the same tensions and intrigues as are played out for the cast – quite possibly one of the most astonishing and consistently puzzling yet satisfying array of viewpoints ever put into a main stream movie.
Bill Canaway and James Doran’s screenplay which sensibly thins down Len Deighton’s novel and contracts the action into an identifiable, plausible London centric landscape, yet never forgets to present character, place and narrative in every single scene; not a second nor a line is wasted.
The other-worldly brain-drain plot, perhaps, which isn’t allowed to drown the realism; instead it overarches the street level shenanigans and the villain’s pillars collapse only at the very end – off screen, in fact – after torture and murder and mayhem have elapsed.
Nigel Green and Guy Doleman, perhaps, as the twin pillars of disgusted authority, whose allegiances seem to sway with Barry’s music and Caine’s affected glances; will Harry Palmer recognise the traitor in time?
The droll humour, perhaps, not so much witty as overtly observational, drawing on tetchy interpersonal relationships, irritating personality ticks and a crawling dread of anything out of the norm, the waggishness steadfastly refuses to plant jokes just to poke fun at the film itself.
Frank Gatliff, perhaps, as Grantby, a.k.a ‘Blue Jay’, the low-key, even mannered, credible and capable villain surrounded by a cohort of much unnamed ugliness.
Ken Adam’s down-at-heel designs, perhaps, a spare contrast to his usual extravagances, messy, dirty, uninvolving and unobtrusive, here rather than being impressive, they add character, contrast and shape to individual sequences.
The smallest details, perhaps: Palmer and ‘House Martin’ mirror-imaged walking the balconies of the Science Museum, Palmer removing his specs before a fist-fight, the US agent following ‘Blue Jay’, the backhanded assistance between the Secret Services and the Met Police, Palmer’s disrespect for routine red tape, his spartan domestic arrangements, recipes stuck on cupboard doors, Mozart on the turntable, the plaque for Dalby’s section ironically reading ‘Domestic Employees Bureau’, his secretary endlessly smoking, the colour ‘red’ recurring as a more and more obvious Freudian clue, the days scratched in sevens on a prison cell wall, our introduction to the duplicitous love interest comes over her shoulder – like Cary Grant in Notorious – what is she hiding other than her shapely legs? – and Palmer searches for his automatic and finds it not under his pillow but even further down his bed than last night’s lady’s cheap bracelet.
Peter Hunt’s editing, perhaps, which cuts effectively and without puzzlement from scene to scene, evoking tension, drama and excitement in equal measure.
Gordon Jackson, Sue Lloyd, Stanley Meadows, Freda Bamford, Thomas Baptiste and the rest of the solid support cast, perhaps, who provide Harry Palmer with just enough to trouble him or to relax him, depending on how much cooking, boxing, loving, shooting or investigating he’s done.
The sheer sixties coolness of the thing, perhaps, a window onto an indefinable cultural moment, a slice of cinema that reminds us times may have been rough, but societal change was afoot in the mid-sixties, class war was rife, prudishness was diminishing, the Cold War was functioning, technology was rising, everyday life was altering for good or bad for everyone, yet in the midst of it all, people smoked, drank, loved, laughed and died for causes unseen or unspoken and sometimes, just sometimes, a movie magically conjures those moments and wraps them in a pretty brown paper parcel so that we can only wonder, just wonder, was it really all as marvellously swinging, yet scrupulously decrepit as this?
A fantastic spy film on every level.
Bloody loved it, as Harry Palmer – or Michael Caine – might say.
Not much to add to my review which originally featured on the Last Film Seen... thread. Perhaps, most interestingly, the film is much better to enjoy and easier to follow than the book. It also dispenses with the silly fireworks ending and instead ensures the Nazi hunting angle takes precedence. Deighton doesn't seem to understand the potential of that theme and is more interested in how Johnny Vulkan's West Berlin dealings affect the British end of things in London. While I don't see Funeral... as a classic spy thriller like I do Ipcress... it is a damn sight better than the novel ! Oscar Homolka is excellent.
While The Ipcress File was wowing them at Cannes, providing Michael Caine with a career launch pad playing a downbeat British special agent of dubious skills, Martin Ritt was going even more downbeat with John Le Carre’s even more anti-OO7 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Filmed in noirish monochrome and dominated by a brutal performance from Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an agent who never quite seems to understand whose side he’s supposed to be on, Le Carre’s vision of spy work was far more morose than Len Deighton’s. I mention this because in part Funeral in Berlin covers similar territory to Ritt’s film, beginning and concluding with escapes across the Berlin Frontier.
The Wall was still fairly new in 1965/66 so it probably had a certain fascination for filmgoers [JFK and “Ich bin ein Berliner” and all that]. Director Guy Hamilton, fresh from Goldfinger, utilises his Berlin locations to demonstrate a genuine sense of a city indulging in Weimar tastes, extravagance and decadence while teetering on the verge of chaos. The hotels are swish, the nightclubs bawdy and the women slinky and sexually available. Despite this, the look of the movie is not as innovative as its forebear. Hamilton only uses those slanted angles when Palmer meets his superior, Colonel Ross, which is a bit like Batman meeting his villains. It is a remarkably ordinary looking film. Guy Doleman is good once again as Ross, tending his garden of weeds, which he likens to marauding refugees – much like the desperate people jumping the wall.
As with Ipcress, Deighton’s original novel is slimmed down for narrative coherence and here the finished story revolves around the defection of a senior Soviet colonel and a band of interfering Zionist agents seeking war criminals. Palmer has his eyes on every prize and second guesses his way to a suitable conclusion. He’s aided by virtually nobody. This is spy V spy V spy V spy. The film opens like West Side Story, a snatched series of scenes showing the day-to-day street life of Berlin, before the camera settles on the barren tract of land near the wall, where all is quiet and life has ceased to exist. A daring Modesty Blaise style escape, or a James Bond enterprise for OHMSS, involving a construction bucket, welcomes the martial music of the titles. Konrad Elfers orchestral score is below par. It is at its best when we don’t hear it. Ken Adam is still on hand, but the editing has been shovelled to John Bloom, and the cast isn’t as interesting.
Palmer is dispatched to Berlin on a Saturday morning. He doesn’t like being disturbed at the weekend and tells his messenger boy such. “You really work on that insubordinate stuff, don’t you,” says his pyjama top clad squeeze, who is making him very bad coffee – nothing like his efforts in Ipcress. Palmer’s not impressed by his orders or by her, well, he likes the view of her legs: “You’re useless in the kitchen; why don’t you get back in bed.” About as anti-Bond as you can get: a frank way of checking his watch after telling his boss he’s going to be late. The woman later turns out to be one of Ross’ secretaries; now James Bond never went there either.
In Berlin, we learn a little more about Palmer’s past, a stores swindle which landed him in a military prison, but kept his partner in crime Johnny Vulkan at leisure. Like Palmer, Vulkan is indebted to Colonel Ross, although his underwear business also nets him a tidy profit. Vulkan is a slippery customer from the get-go. As is slinky sexy lingerie model Samantha Steel – Eva Renzi, very nice, but dubbed by Nikki Van Der Zyl, so I kept thinking she sounded like Honey Rider / Ursula Andress. Oskar Homolka delivers a riotous turn as the double-crossing old Bolshevik Colonel Stok. Hugh Burden has the key role of the inside man, already under suspicion because he’s a homosexual, and losing his loyalties faster than the bodies can pile up.
The film is solid rather than spectacular. It doesn’t do anything wrong, but it lacks the sparkle which made Ipcress such a starkly, sleek and impressive outing. Berlin tries to be seedy, tries to be dangerous, but you never have the impression Palmer is in any peril. Michael Caine carries the film well, already displaying his star quality, but only Doleman and Homolka are giving him any support. The screenplay is flat and its humour entirely misplaced – an early reference to Batman clouds it in a pop culture reference that both dates the film and makes a faintly obvious point: that spies don’t have a ton of secret special gadgets. The writer is trying to tell us we are not watching James Bond, but simply by doing so he acknowledges a debt to the genre and makes his own task more difficult.
There is plenty to enjoy, despite the low key action, but it is mostly in the early sections as Palmer negotiates his way around Vulkan, Stok, Samantha, the Berlin police, Ross, Kreutsmann and the transexuals at a cabaret. The secondary plot about Nazi hunters and the war criminal Paul Louis Bloum serves to add intrigue but fails to generate any extra tension. The film ends in an underwhelming confrontation close to the Wall. Nobody seems to have won this particularly grubby game, which feels remarkably similar to Martin Ritt and John Le Carre’s viewpoint in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
There’s a lot of love for this on IMDB. Reviewers hark on about how realistic and earthy it is, how they identify with the Cold War setting. Personally, I find the lack of panache dates the film irrevocably. Unlike Ipcress, which has a stylised and identifiable look, one that allows it to boldly escape the confines of its decade, Funeral in Berlin could only have been made in the sixties and it remains there, a dour and rather unimaginative time capsule.
One of my favourites, and I like it more than "Ipcress" except for the music as you'd expect. Sir Mike inhabits Harry 100% and gives more of an impression that he's in control (or at least understands) the events and characters than in the previous movie or the next, in both of which he's more often than not buffeted around by them.
Yes, the plot is trimmed compared to the novel and I also love old Homolka who pretty much steals the film. I do rate it more highly than you, Chris, though a lot of that is nostalgia. I'm not looking back the same way, since I read the book and saw the film when I was very young back in the sixties (unlike being in my sixties like now).
Paul Hubschmid wasn't bad as Vulkan, though there's less there than in the book. I spotted him years after seeing this starring in
made over ten years earlier. He was of course younger and using a different name ("Paul Christian") and it took me a while to recognise him.
Eva Renzi was pretty bad as Samantha, but helped by our old pal Nikki as you said above.
I never quite understand the criticism that a reference or style has dated: it wasn't being made for today. Like Barbel I tend to prefer Funeral: I just find the plot more interesting. I can't disagree that Ipcress is the more historic work, with more style, but at times I find that style of it rather oppressive, all the dutch angles and CCTV-esque camera positions draw attention to themselves and begin to feel pretentious. It is much more cool than Funeral, but it also really knows it.
As Barbel says, I love the characterisation of Harry in Funeral. The way he plays it as if he's on the back foot, passive and being played by everyone else but behind the scenes is actually working the plan to his advantage. They keep this up in the next film too, showing they did understand their main character. I also agree with Barbel about Caine here: he's become a real star in the meantime since the last film and Harry is such a perfect part for him: that apparent passive quality means he just has to use his eyes very subtly - he underpays it brilliantly. I don't think the Broum plot is a subplot at all: it's what's been behind the whole thing. The idea that the macguffin is the legend that our hero spy is sent out to the mission using as his own alias is a brilliant idea, I love it.
It is more of the 'solid' entry in the series whereas Ipcress is the transcendent classic, I can certainly see that (in terms of a time capsule I love the supermarket scene in Ipcress: that we have this character who is so appalled by this 'American' concept!) but it's Funeral which I return to more.
Thanks for the input @Barbel@emtiem very much appreciated - always good to have alternative viewpoints.
Quickly rolling on...
BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (1967)
Also reviewed a few months back on the Last Film Seen thread, Billion Dollar Brain came quickly on the heels of its source novel, which may explain why the film seems so disjointed. Ken Russell never made any other film like it before or since. I enjoy the flshy, trashy feel he conveys. You can tell he isn't taking things very seriously while all his actors are being asked to play things straight, accepting the sojourn to Latvia which is high farce and unsuccessful high farce at that. Russell couldn't do spies and frankly, he couldn't do comedy either. Like Deighton's novel, the film starts brightly but becomes frayed around the edges by the time the big villain appears. It is only the force of Ed Begley's General Midwinter that keeps me watching. Fine visuals, but then Deighton has fine descriptions. I fail to see why Harry Palmer was taken out of the SIS and portrayed as a private detective [although he gets rehired]. Far easier to simply have him retired or something; the first scene doesn't feel like Harry Palmer at all - no fancy food, no pretty flat and even prettier bedmate, no classical music, no coffee grinder - and you wonder if Russell watched the forst two films before he took the directing job. Still, I enjoy the whole disfunctional mess, finding it lively and intriguing, despite being faintly ridiculous.
Billion Dollar Brain kicks off with Colonel Ross infiltrating the H.P. Detective Agency. This pokey office is, one assumes, in Soho; the flickering red and blue lights suggest it. The exterior is actually on Pentonville Road. The office doubles as Harry Palmer’s digs. He’s come down in the world quite a bit since The Ipcress File: sleeping in his office, unmade beds, convenience food, dishes unwashed, a tip and a life of disastrous proportions. Chasing infidelities doesn’t suit Palmer and Ross knows it. He wants Palmer back in the Secret Service, but the two don’t see eye to eye. Instead, having sent his ex-boss away with a flea in his ear, Palmer receives a package containing a wedge of money and a ticket to Helsinki, simultaneously answering a metallic, pre-recorded telephone message offering him carriage instructions to Finland.
It isn’t entirely clear why Palmer has to be a free agent. He wasn’t in the novel, which has a plausible explanation for sending our Harry to Finland, and he really isn’t a free agent here either – Ross follows his errant ex-employee and re-enlists him to retrieve the vacuum flask Palmer abandoned with his Finnish contacts. The flask contains half a dozen eggs, each one infected with a deadly virus, a product of the UK’s Porton Down research facility. This chemical and biological evil is irrelevant to the evolving plot, a cute McGuffin which Palmer, and we, think is important, but leads us nowhere.
More pertinent is Palmer’s old acquaintance Leo Newbigen, a character written out of the film version of Funeral in Berlin, whose young mistress, Anya, takes an obvious like to the cocky Englishman. These two cunning operators appear to be perfecting an uprising in Latvia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Newbigen demonstrates the global-spanning ‘Brain’, a computer which gives him remote orders, sent from Texas and the headquarters of the Crusade for Freedom, an anti-Communist pro-capitalist nationalist army and scientific society orchestrated operatically by the oil magnate General Midwinter. The ‘Brain’ orders the elimination of a suspected enemy agent: Anya. Meanwhile, another old friend, Colonel Stok, seems to know more about Harry, Midwinter and the uprising than anybody. It seems Palmer’s troubles are only just beginning.
Billion Dollar Brain gets a casual dismissal from most armchair critics, but that’s a trifle unfair. True, it isn’t as engaging as Ipcress, nor does it have the grounded, earthy feel of Funeral. What it does have is a wider Cold War scope, which encompasses both the fantastically imaginative and the same old double-dealing which prevaricates most espionage scenarios. Here it is Leo Newbigen, played with some enthusiasm by Karl Malden, and Anya – the delicately beautiful Francoise Dorleac, who was tragically killed in a car accident immediately after filming her role – who impersonate the villainous tricksters. A more straightforward bad guy is the believably insane Ed Begley, who inhabits General Midwinter with all the gusto and righteous anger of an evangelist preacher: “My arm is long and my vengeance is total!” He spouts vitriol, pride, avarice, common sense, conspiracy theory, the Word of the Lord and complete lunacy, sometimes all in one sentence. Midwinter is as unhinged as any Bond villain. In fact, he’s a damn sight better than many of them. Midwinter frightens because he’s so palpably real, disconnected from the outside world, consumed by his own modern crusade, fascinated with his personal achievements, bound by the gun and the sword, the General is one small roaring step away from starting a nuclear war. What is so good about Begley’s portrayal, unlike a similarly manic Stephen Berkoff in Octopussy, is the unsentimental pontificating. Berkoff’s General Orlov was devious, deluded and, occasionally, stroppy; a schoolboy denied his toys. Midwinter is the fully grown man, certain of his belief system, enthralled by the adoration of his retinue, subsumed by his own cult of forceful personality. This is exactly the kind of madness which starts wars and slaughters thousands and millions. Strange too, from a modern perspective, that it is incorrect misinformed data which advises Midwinter his plans are succeeding, and that he continues his campaign even when confronted with [for him] the unpalatable truth. Here is a true lunatic of the grandest scale, parading beneath a winged MW symbol that has all the associations of fascism, double-headed eagles and military iron. Begley’s robust, violent, virulent, non-stop performance is astounding. He drives the film forward at the very moment it was starting to flounder. Michael Caine too seems to come alive at this point and Harry Palmer ceases to be a bemused cheeky chappie and morphs back into the wily, verbally slick secret agent we know and love him to be.
The film is strong visually. Cinematographer Billy Williams does some good work with the snowy Finnish landscapes. The slow moving ice floes of Helsinki’s Capital Region form a portent of disaster to come. Director Ken Russell occasionally pulls out some startling scenes, although he’s not as innovative as Sidney J. Furie, erring to bombast rather than subtlety. The eerie, crystal hued visit to Dr Kaarna’s mansion is one; our first sight of Dorleac, in close up, whispering a password is another; the intercut preparations and inspections of Midwinter’s army a third; the fiery Texas hoedown an incongruous fourth highlight; he even handles the billion dollar computer set with some aplomb. Russell, being an emotionally over the top director, lets his camera linger on Ed Begley and Oskar Homolka’s out of the box performances, and rightly so. There is frequent criticism that he didn’t understand the plot, but that surely is a question for the screenwriter and John McGrath’s adaptation does have holes in it, but no more than the Berlin Wall or an Albanian torture chamber. In fact, the holes are mostly where we came in, with that nest of eggs, a chancel which causes the most confusion. The film benefits from, I feel, repeated viewing.
The central theme from Richard Rodney Bennett is excellent, although he comes unstuck dramatically. Producer Harry Saltzman utilises old friend Maurice Binder to cut a half decent main titles sequence. A fourth film [Horse Under Water] was planned as part of an eleven picture deal Caine made with the producer and his Lowndes Productions company, but apparently the poor returns on this one scuppered that – it disappointed in the U.S. market, hardly a surprise given the less than flattering portrait offered of American espionage expertise. Like the takings, Billion Dollar Brain feels like an underachievement. When it’s good, it’s very good, but much of the middle portion is unbalanced by the confused plot and an inappropriate sense of slapstick. It needed straightening out. Ken Russell and editor Alan Osbiston were not up to the task. I wonder what Peter Hunt might have made of it.
Very impressive review, thanks @chrisno1. I'm with you most of the way. This is my favourite of the series and I've watched it many times.
Little factoids- the voice of the titular Brain is Donald Sutherland, who has a brief part as a technician. Susan George can be spotted on a train. It took many years to be released on home video owing to a quick excerpt from Beatles music which would have been prohibitively expensive to licence and has now been inaudibly and invisibly excised. The postman at the start is Caine's brother Stanley.
I am very fond of Bennett's music here, and just had to have the OST album. I do like the book but feel this to be one of those rare instances of the film being better.And yes, Ed Begley's performance is extraordinary. He and Homolka (again) steal the entire film from their younger and higher billed (and presumably higher paid) costars.
I did not know that about Donald Sutherland, and yet now you say that I can recognise his voice immediately!
I'm fond of this one too. It's probably the least of the three for me, after a strong start I feel like it falls apart quite rapidly, but there's still loads to love in there. I really like the whole sequence where Harry is abducted by the Russians to meet Stok, the wilds of Finland look amazing together with RRB's lovely spooky, ethereal score, Caine is as great as always and looks supercool in this one too (there's a couple of moments where he does some insanely dangerous and yet visually unimpressive stunts: he hops on the icy step of a moving train: potential death! And then later he jumps between floating lumps of ice on a frozen lake- if he'd gone in he'd be dead there too!), and much like in Funeral, Harry is kind of the passive observer, being shunted around between different protagonists, and yet underneath his mind is ticking away the whole time. He's kind of like the spy Columbo. As Chris mentioned the whole Midwinter situation is fantastic. He's played brilliantly because he feels so dangerous (the zany costumes maybe undermine the threat here) - like the Broum documents in the last one, I absolutely love the story idea of a villain who is basically on our side, and yet must be stopped because his overzealous passion threatens everything. Weirdly it feels even more possible today with the billionaire nutjobs we have around now. I'm surprised we haven't seen that lifted more by other films- Chris is right that Octopussy has the reverse version (which I hadn't spotted before- and of course that means Fourth Protocol has it too as Forsyth stole the plot!) but I think I kind of prefer it this way around.
I feel like it has more flat spots than the other two and the pace flags a few times, but there's still loads to enjoy. And somehow "Hello. Who is this?" has kind of become mine and my friends' idea of Harry's catchphrase for some reason!
and much like in Funeral, Harry is kind of the passive observer, being shunted around between different protagonists, and yet underneath his mind is ticking away the whole time.
This is an exceptionalky valid observation which I have neglected to include in my reviews, but it is certainly true of both Funeral and Billion $ Brain. It is much more how Deighton writes the unnamed protagonist of the novels. Caine has developed quickly as an actor, I feel, and represents this excellently. It would be interesting to know if he had a hand in the cinema version's mannerisms, dialogues, etc, as while his performance in Ipcress is admirable and works within the strata of that film, there Palmer sometimes has a tendency to shift from intelligent to obtuse through startled. Palmer goes through the mill quite a bit in Ipcress, but Caine isn't quite as natural in some scenes as he is in others. That can't be said of the two follow ups.
Yeah I think it's interesting that we get that in both Funeral and Brain: the makers had obviously identified that's how Palmer functions and what makes him different to other screen spies.
after three or four years of searching I've finally found DVDs of Funeral in Berlin and (a year later) Billion Dollar Brain. Ipcress File still eludes me. For some reason the DVDs of these three films are very hard to find.
And moving on, no poster for this one, just the DVD cover, whcih I notice is a Touchstone release. Disney has come a long way...
BULLET TO BEIJING (1995)
Michael Caine ranked his experience of making this film and its follow up Midnight in St Petersburg as so terrible he vowed never to make a movie again. Some vow. He was back within a year alongside Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine and has only just announced a more likely permanent retirement in 2023, almost thirty years on. He was 61 when he made the film which revisits his break out role of Harry Palmer.
Bullet to Beijing is no masterpiece of cinema. In fact the producers considered it so poor they shovelled it out as a television movie. That’s a trifle unjust, although the movie does compare unfavourably to Goldeneye, the Bond entry of the same year. What is noticeable is that Caine’s Harry Palmer retains a working class chip on his shoulder and while his actions and reactions may be physically slower – even a resigned shrug at his summary dismissal from the British Secret Service seems achingly conveyed – his mind is still working as sharp as it did in the 1960s. Caine presents Harry Palmer as a weary observer of life and all its dubious character. He’s still chasing Sue Lloyd’s Jean, still tied to his spectacles, still equipped with a cheeky response to an unexpected question, still offering laconic glances over changing faces, his own countenance indefatigable and inscrutable. I enjoy this older version of Harry, a man clearly attempting to cling to his youth, but recognising youth really does do things better or at least with more urgency and less fear. So he turns down the opportunity of midnight passion with ice maiden Mia Sara in favour of breakfast and information. The story is populated by old spies and spy networks, all creaking and groaning under the new freedoms of Glasnost. It looks much like an easy and only excuse to employ some over the hill actors like Michael Sarrazin and Burt Kwok. Michael Gambon makes a brief impression as one of the new breed of gangster oligarchs, Alexei Alexeyevich, or Alex for short.
The plot involves the assassination of a Russian chemist in London during a demonstration outside the North Korean Embassy. Harry witnesses the killing, but after filing his report and requesting to pursue the case, his superior, Col Wilson [Patrick Allen] retires him on a pauper’s pension. Instead, Harry takes a freelance role in St Petersburg, chiefly because he has been given a free air ticket and an envelope full of US dollars. There he is followed and almost killed by Chechen rebels, although why is never made entirely clear. It makes for a diverting river boat chase though. His contact is Jason Connery, who as Nikolai proves once again that he is not a touch on his dad in the acting stakes. It later transpires Nikolai may be Palmer’s son, but the British agent denies it. Luckily this revelation comes much too late to spoil proceedings, which could have descended into a dire secret service version of Indy & the Last Crusade. Instead, Harry sponges around the city meeting old friends and contacts of the espionage game, most of them retired, all of them on a take of some kind and some of them out to play Harry Palmer for a fool.
But Harry Palmer is no fool, he never was and he still isn’t. Alex wants Harry to find out who has stolen the formula for a biological weapon called Alorex and the hunt leads Harry to take the cross continental bullet train to Beijing where all his old foes and friends start to crawl out of the sidings. I enjoyed the early section of the film, where the incidents seem to pile on top of poor Harry Palmer, making it a sort of modern picaresque picture as he stumbles out of one crisis and into another. Strange things continue to occur to Harry – being tossed off a train, crashlanding an Antonov airplane, threatened with poisoning – yet he always seems both distracted and one step ahead – you can tell from the way Caine indicates matters with a flick of the lip, a sly eye roll, a deep gaggle of laughter. If his enemies believe they are playing Harry Palmer, they have it all wrong, for he is just as adept at playing them.
The eventual reveal is clever, but leaves several questions unanswered and this doesn’t help our enjoyment. The basic storyline is easy to follow, but the extra characters and the interwoven stories fail to hold up. I was reminded of The Living Daylights as the gist of the villain’s plan seems to be not about selling biological warfare secrets but about exporting heroin for massive profit. I got thoroughly lost during the scenes onboard the bullet train. It seemed very strange to have three cohorts of people working for the same person, none of whom are aware the others exist, and this aspect of the story wasn’t satisfactorily explained at all. Nor were the early gunbattles involving the Chechens. The scenes on the bullet train where Palmer uncovers the secret cache of weapons in a packing case in the cargo car reminded me of an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie where he keeps opening coffins on a train in the search for a fantastic diamond. I anticipated Col Wilson reappearing at the end to offer Palmer his job back, but this wheel of fortune was overlooked. The finale is plenty messy anyway and makes no obvious sense simply because we can’t tell who is shooting at who and why.
The movie was written by Peter Welbeck, a pseudonym for the producer Harry Alan Towers. Towers was most famous for making cheap, quick knock off movies in Hong Kong and Europe, stuff like the sixties Fu Manchu cycle. He promoted them as big budget spectacles, but they were not. His script is functional at best. Sadly, no actor really seizes the mantle, preferring to slum it and run, so the project flounders most of the time, even if it has an interesting premise and a starry sounding cast.
Bullet to Beijing is not the disaster critics and Michael Caine would have you believe, but it doesn’t gratify in the way the sixties Harry Palmer films did, lacking a cynical edge, a decent music score and any fun, elegantly framed photography. It is spectacularly ordinary, which is a complement of sorts, but only makes us wish for a movie with a little more substance. It might have been better had the producers persuaded Len Deighton to tighten up the script, but although the author’s name appeared on some promotional material, he had no connection with the film at all. Bullet to Beijing remains a disappointing lost opportunity to reignite a successful film series.
I haven't seen it since the 90s, I just remember it being very hard to enjoy. Not the worst film I've ever seen no, but just not good at all and I remember struggling to recognise Harry in it. Midnight I do remember being a lot worse.
There's a fun bit where they're going to throw Harry off the train and he says "Can we wait for a slow bit?". That was good. That's it.
Another DVD cover. I have been storing these reviews up until I caught this one on telly. It appears periodically on those Great Action / Legend / Crap TV channels...
MIDNIGHT IN SAINT PETERSBURG (1996)
The credits to this straight-to-video thriller sequel proudly declare this is Len Deighton’s Midnight in Saint Petersburg. I don’t know how the author felt about being given responsibility for such a so-so slice of entertainment, but having just read his four ‘Harry Palmer’ novels I can attest that screenwriter Peter Welbeck at least attempts to create the atmosphere of a Len Deighton 1960s thriller. Welbeck is a pseudonym for film producer Harry Alan Towers, a notorious penny-pincher who had international success with cheap and cheerful knock-off jobs usually filmed in Hong Kong. The films cost little but made money in foreign markets in fleapit cinemas. Occasionally he’d have genuine success; Fu Manchu mostly. Towers, or Welbeck if you like, has clearly understood what makes a Len Deighton novel tick, so he has Micheal Caine’s disinterested Harry Palmer wandering in and out of St Petersburg and Moscow high and low life while his actions seem to have little bearing on the investigation he’s charged with. Harry isn’t in the SIS anymore; he’s heading up a detective agency in Moscow – perhaps with the cooperation of a retired colonel Stok, who always seemed to like him – but is making enemies quicker than clients. His private-eye status has made him a less obnoxious individual, but he’s still clutching at straws for clues, some so thin we [and he, one assumes] can’t see them; chiefly because Welbeck, like Deighton, doesn’t telegraph them, nor even whisper it, he simply buries it somewhere and never mentions it. Like Deighton’s work, Midnight in Saint Petersburg suffers not so much from overcomplication [it isn’t complicated] but from a lack of decent explanation as to how lucky Harry Palmer solves the case. Luck, then, perhaps?
Chief culprits, as in the novels, are the support characters, friends and enemies who come and go with little or no introduction and exit. Let’s meet Louis – Louis who? Never know. Let’s meet Boris – Boris who? Never told. Let’s meet Brandy – Brandy who? – a journalist apparently, Palmer shows no surprise at her fortuitous appearances, much as he does with everybody in the books. Colonel Kornikov, Hans Schreiber, Feodor Zavarin, who? who? who? I could go on. Palmer even has a series of telephone calls between himself and his private investigation team back in Moscow, who do a ton of research for him without ever leaving the confines of their office. He could just as easily be calling Jean and Alice and Dawlish in London. Micheal Sarrazin and Lev Prygunov return as his pals Craig and Gradsky. We also re-meet Micheal Gambon’s Alexei Alexeyevich and Anotoli Davydov’s Yuri Stephanovich, the two competing Russian mafioso encountered in the previous sequel Bullet to Beijing. It’s almost impossible to keep up with who is who and what they are all doing. While the plot is basically quite simple, Towers / Welbeck’s inspiration is to make it like a Deighton novel, so the narrative makes it difficult with a series of dead end scenes that don’t tell us very much about anything. Usually, at the point we think Harry Palmer should be getting answers the people he questions either die or simply don’t provide an answer. Michael Caine looks suitably frustrated by this constant turn of events.
The movie isn’t helped by having to give sidekick Jason Connery something to do. So his ballerina girlfriend, Tatiana, is kidnapped and he spends most of the movie forlornly trying to find her. The man responsible is German terrorist Hans Schreiber. Tatiana’s father happens to be the curator at the Hermitage Museum; Schreiber blackmails him into exchanging $5million-worth of art for his daughter. Schreiber plans to sell the paintings to antique expert Armand Vestry, who in turn will collect a hefty insurance reward. The $5m will be paid by Schreiber to Alexei Alexeyevich in return for 1000g of stolen weapons grade plutonium. A secret message delivered to Harry Palmer asks for his help in recovering the plutonium and the whole spider’s web of intrigue unfurls like a spinning yarn. While it is never made explicitly clear, it seems Harry Palmer has been employed by the Saint Petersburg police, whose chief appears most grateful for the recovery of the paintings and the plutonium !
The film isn’t doing very much. Visually, it is a shoddy piece of work. It looks as cheap as it is. Michael Caine doesn’t remove his overcoat[s] for the entire length of the film. Some of the actors don’t just talk on the phone, they phone their performances in. Nobody seems very interested in making the project anything more than it is: a cheap knock-off job. I’m rather disappointed. All the money saving devices – same crew, locations, sets, etc – fail to convince. In its efforts to pay homage to Deighton, the film lurches from scene to scene with a line or two of pithy dialogue and an occasional tryst of action. The legacy of Harry Palmer is sadly suffering a terminal decline.
I have nothing more to add other than to mention that the film’s runtime is phenomenally short at just 86 minutes. Let us be thankful for short mercies then.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,746Chief of Staff
edited June 22
I’ve never seen Midnight In Saint Petersburg all the way through…even at it’s mercifully short 86 min run time…Michael Caine is usually watchable at the very least…but I just couldn’t watch this shoddy film to the end…as you say, the production values are nonexistent, and you do wonder if they actually had a budget for this? 🤷🏻♂️
I'm sure I read somewhere (can't quote a source, this was a long time ago) that the second of these films "Midnight" was made from outtakes from the first, "Bullet". I don't know the truth of this, but it's believable.
Comments
Ah yes, sorry about that, enthusiasm, see. Mind you, the chapter where 'Palmer' learns this term is another episode that drags the narrative out, a day / night trip to a specialist's cottage in North Wales. The whole scene could have been done in London.
FUNERAL IN BERLIN (1964)
Unlike my readings of Len Deighton’s previous two ‘Harry Palmer’ novels, I declined to refer to the appendices while reading the narrative, although I did glance quickly at the page notes when given. This, I felt, might prevent me from being annoyed by them. It did. Instead I was annoyed by other things. My Harper’s copy from 2009 features a long introduction from Deighton explaining how Berlin became [in his words] ‘a second home’ after meeting the director Kurt Jung Alsen at the National Film Theatre in London following a showing of his film The Story of Private Pooley. Deighton subsequently went to visit Alsen in East Berlin. I mention this because Private Pooley was made in 1961, and Deighton does mention the Wall being put up, but given Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, its events take place in late 1963 and Deighton had written and published two novels in this period, I query this ‘a second home’ reference. I can understand being obsessed with a city, especially if one is researching, but that description seems far too endearing. It doesn’t help matters that the action of the book only resides in Berlin for half its time. The rest of the book is spent in France, Prague and a dreary London, mostly in offices and on telephones and with hardly an ounce of interest from page-to-page.
Dreary describes it well. Funeral in Berlin is about as cold a yarn as a Cold War yard gets. It is frozen. Inexplicably dull, the novel isn’t helped by a plot so maze like you need a map to unravel it. Characters appear from the hedgerows as you turn corners, or pages, and incidents that cry out for some sort of excitement fizzle away to nothing. The climax takes place on derelict ground in London on Bonfire Night with ‘Palmer’ chucking fireworks about while his homosexual agitator tries to gun him down. The stuff in Berlin finished chapters before. The whole exercise is a tawdry experience. Ex-Nazi’s hide in plain sight in Germany and Spain, corrupt British officials pull invisible strings across the continent, Israeli secret service agents seek a super-dooper agricultural fertilizer [yes, really] and the Russians pull better strings than the British. The Americans dip their oar in the mustard in the form of Harvey Newbegin [not Leo as in the film Billion Dollar Brain, his role in this book is so insignificant despite pages and pages devoted to him, that the screen writers edited him out for the cinema version]. The best sections involved the old Bolshevik Colonel Stok, who at least felt real, read real and talked real. Everyone else seems to be acting like someone else and sounding like it, from Johnnie Vulkan’s crooked German to Samantha Steel’s deceptive Jew, to Hallum’s fortune seeker to ‘Harry Palmer’ himself, pulling the metaphorical wool over everyone’s eyes.
Deighton gives us all that detail we have already come to recognise as his forte: the rain rolling off Vulkan’s face onto his shoes, Hallum’s cats, Stok’s toes picking up coal-pokers, Alice chain-smoking, Dawlish’s weeds, Jean and her irrepressible haircuts. Deighton takes us away from his lead character occasionally to offer goblets of insight into the other main players, reverting to a third person narrative each time, but the brief respite from ‘Harry’s know-it-all dialogue and description doesn’t lighten the mood enough. Dawlish’s procrastinations and pontifications don’t help. A modicum of explanation might assist, but there isn’t any. Sometimes I felt as if ‘Harry Palmer’ was being deliberately obscure simply so he [by which I mean Len Deighton] could prove how obtuse the rest of the cast [by which I mean us] truly are; in his mind at any rate. The whole thing is as dense as a rock cake and quite as indigestible. Maybe I am missing the charm of a truly Cold War, but the novel felt curiously irrelevant, as if the plan and its execution and the people around it had no bearing on history or even on ‘Harry Palmer’ who remains as untouched by events as the rain soaked newspaper he spies on the street at the novel’s end.
Berlin – a new crisis? screams the headline. ‘Palmer’ barely registers the fact, he’s too busy catching up on dreary old pre-swinging London. I consider the film adaptation of Funeral in Berlin to be the least interesting of the Harry Palmer movies, certainly the 1960s trilogy, but goodness this book was hard work.
In a second introduction, illustrator Arnold Schwartzmann explains the creative process behind his montage cover. This was more interesting than the novel which follows. Still, at least the very excellent cover goes some way to generating the landscape of Deighton’s cloaked and crooked spy world.
Excellent review, well thought out.
The film is probably my favourite of the three. That version has a really satisfying plot I think.
The plot of the movie is vastly altered and the locations effectively condensed. The film IMO does what the book should be doing, creating a tense and believable Cold War environment. FIB '66 has its good moments, just not enough of them for me. I understand why people like it. Compared to the book, it is streets ahead.
BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (1966)
Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ escapades come to an end in familiar fashion, although not without some interest thanks mostly to a more streamlined plot. The narrative though does the usual meanderings all over the world and eventually becomes its own laconic funeral as an episode of much promise peters out into a series of head-to-heads during which Deighton’s unnamed protagonist decides that the “day of the political philosopher is over. Men no longer betray their country for an ideal; they respond to immediate problems.” ‘Palmer’ displays the same immediate instincts when protecting his country’s interests; no ideal – political or personal – will divert him from his arduous and unfathomable tasks.
Billion Dollar Brain begins effectively enough with a touch of mystery surrounding the theft of some ‘eggs’ from Portadown and ‘Palmer’s pursuit of them to Helsinki. Following the death of his contact Dr Kaarna, ‘Harry’ reacquaints himself with Harvey Newbegin, the American rascal who barely featured in Funeral in Berlin, yet appears to be a big cog in ‘Harry Palmer’s European wheel of agents. Newbegin has got ‘Harry’ and everybody on the hop, including his new squeeze Signe, his wife, Russia’s Colonel Stok, a bunch of Latvian rebels and the frankly bonkers ultra-nationalist General Midwinter. This last character has a crazy introduction in New York at a strange sub-swinging-sixties costume party packed full of people reenacting American Independence. Strange doesn’t do half the explaining. It was at this point that the novel began to go off the rails. What had been an intriguing and well-constructed tale of deceit, double cross and delectable seduction simply unravelled into a trawl of chapters designed to send one to sleep.
I exaggerate slightly, but Deighton’s incessant need to demonstrate how singularly unexciting life is for a secret agent merely makes his books unexciting as well. For half its length, Billion Dollar Brain is clever, incisive and swift. Then it just becomes boring as ‘Palmer’ travels to New York, to Texas, to London and Helsinki and Leningrad and barely a thing happens unless it comes from someone’s mouth. Dialogue drives stories – it can also kill them. Deighton seems to have forgotten that thrillers ought to be thrilling and having his hero uncover a couple of red herrings, a couple of corpses and shoving a bad guy under a bus simply isn’t enough excitement for this reader. It doesn’t help that most of the conversations are about nothing related to the central story: the virus infected eggs and how General Midwinter plans to use them to overthrow communism. In fact, I am not sure it is even hinted at; Midwinter – who is as unhinged as any great baddie should be – doesn’t even get to be the main villain. He’s sort of shuffled in and shuffled out when Deighton wants to score political points about the USA and its ill-informed anti-socialist agendas. Instead, Deighton concentrates on Harvey Newbegin, who isn’t a grand villain; he’s just a man who loves money and cheats on his wife with a teenage sexpot.
I was somewhat disconcerted by the age of the lovely Signe Laine. She claims to be “almost eighteen” and Deighton describes her as an ingenue, yet apparently she is one of Midwinter’s great assets, having eliminated three enemy agents. She wants to attempt the same on poor Harvey, but ‘Palmer’ skittles him away too fast, although she knows Harvey’s number is already up whatever the deluded lovesick American thinks. Colonel Stok watches all the proceedings with a heavy eye and a nice line in wit, which is lacking almost everywhere else.
Regards the age of characters, Deighton seems to have changed his mind over ‘Harry Palmer’. In Horse Under Water, ‘Palmer’ was described as having been involved in the Second World War. Here he tells Signe that eighteen years ago he was sitting exams, so he could be as young as 34 [GCE’s at 16] or 39 [a three year degree at 21] or he might be older if he took exams in the army. Alternatively, given ‘Palmer’ hides behind identities, he might be lying about his age also, or about his army experience – who knows? This disguise of character has advantages in terms of reinvention, but doesn’t help us empathise with anything ‘Palmer’ tells us about himself, others or the world as we begin to misunderstand what he is about, where he has come from and why he is how he is. Like Harvey Newbegin, he succumbs to the nymphet’s charms anyway, probably because it’s all in the line of duty, although he never makes that clear either.
The innovations Deighton introduced for his debut The Ipcress File – all those appendices and the neat lines about London and the life of an operative – have become old-hat in four books. The landscape hasn’t changed any for ‘Harry Palmer’. If anything, the cynicism has gone, to be replaced by doses of lethargic banter. ‘Palmer’s on-off affair with his secretary Jean is becoming a bore, especially as he keeps making love to other women as soon as he gets into the field. She is still obsessed with her hair. His boss, Dawlish, is beginning to sound like that public school bowler hatted comic strip official Sir Gerald Tarrant from Modesty Blaise; his attention to overgrown weeds and crass antiques doesn’t so much add depth as despair. The scenes where he condescends to ‘Palmer’ and ‘Palmer’ condescends back have ceased to be amusing. Here, they also go on far too long and get in the way of the story. The same could be said of the sojourn to New York. The film version sensibly transfers most of this dialogue and meeting to Texas. The weeks of in depth training ‘Palmer’ receives at Midwinter’s HQ as skimped over in favour of a dull night swapping family stories with Harvey and his wife. The fantastic titular Billion Dollar Brain hardly gets a chapter. It’s surprising how much of the novel was extracted for the movie, although not necessarily in the right order or location. Like Funeral… the movie is an improvement on the book.
The final chapters are set back in London as ‘Harry’ tries to secure safe passage for a traitor, his wife and child: a distinctly tensionless series of scenes that call into question ‘Palmer’s ethics. I mean, what are his ideals, his purpose, as a British agent? While James Bond [and others] are described as killers, men at the behest of their governments, in the bear pit of espionage, ‘Harry Palmer’ hovers around it knocking pawns off the proverbial chess board. It really is a game to him: who can be trusted, who not, how to manoeuvre someone into an unresolvable position, how to escape, where to hide, what to say or usually what not. Even when ‘Palmer’ tells us, I can’t recognise the clues and have to back track they are so unobtrusively hidden in the action – or more likely the interminable dialogues. I just want something to happen and, in the last two novels especially, nothing does in ‘Harry Palmer’s world.
It’s easy to see why Ian Fleming and James Bond were so popular when you read this kind of novel, one which makes you feel the author is determined to be pretentious, considering his work too good for his own readers. Thrillers ought to build to a climax and this one, like its immediate predecessor, does not. The impressionable first half feels like a wasted opportunity.
Disappointing.
After myself giving up with a Deighton years back you don’t make me want to pick it up again!
I do like the concept of Midwinter: a stupid rich guy trying to end the Cold War himself is a great idea for a villain.
THE IPCRESS FILE (1965)
Previously available in the Last Film Seen... thread and reposted here.
I could spend ages comparing the book to the film, but really what would be the point? I think it sufficient to say that the novel is intriguing, but meanders too much and never delivers a knock out blow. The film meanwhile is incisive and feels important, both on a narrative level and in a cultural one. Slimming down the action and the landscapes helps immeasureably to focus our attentions. Caine is probably about the right age to play Deighton's spy - based on what he tells us in Billion Dollar Brain - but I am not convinced the novel's hero is as working class as the film makes him. Definately got a chip on his shoulder though. Worth noting as always the brilliant John Barry score, the excellent Peter Hunt editing and the riveting camera use by director Sidney J. Furie and photographer Otto Heller.
Where to start?
Michael Caine, perhaps, in a career defining role as Harry Palmer, bringing elements of schoolboy charm to a working class, slightly obnoxious, slightly sarcastic, clever, yet ever-so put-upon spy – “insubordinate, insolent, a trickster with criminal tendencies.”
John Barry’s music, perhaps, with its memorable theme played out over scenes of Palmer’s domestic life, its jazz notes swaying, a pre-Thunderball score of incidental excellence.
Sidney J. Furie’s incisive direction, perhaps, almost entirely shot from obscure angles to give us the impression we are clandestinely observing the action – from the floor, below a desk, a bed, a car, through a key hole, chicken wire, a lamp shade, a windscreen, a telephone booth, a spectacle lens, etc, etc – not only is the audience constantly off-balance, they are also prone to the same tensions and intrigues as are played out for the cast – quite possibly one of the most astonishing and consistently puzzling yet satisfying array of viewpoints ever put into a main stream movie.
Bill Canaway and James Doran’s screenplay which sensibly thins down Len Deighton’s novel and contracts the action into an identifiable, plausible London centric landscape, yet never forgets to present character, place and narrative in every single scene; not a second nor a line is wasted.
The other-worldly brain-drain plot, perhaps, which isn’t allowed to drown the realism; instead it overarches the street level shenanigans and the villain’s pillars collapse only at the very end – off screen, in fact – after torture and murder and mayhem have elapsed.
Nigel Green and Guy Doleman, perhaps, as the twin pillars of disgusted authority, whose allegiances seem to sway with Barry’s music and Caine’s affected glances; will Harry Palmer recognise the traitor in time?
The droll humour, perhaps, not so much witty as overtly observational, drawing on tetchy interpersonal relationships, irritating personality ticks and a crawling dread of anything out of the norm, the waggishness steadfastly refuses to plant jokes just to poke fun at the film itself.
Frank Gatliff, perhaps, as Grantby, a.k.a ‘Blue Jay’, the low-key, even mannered, credible and capable villain surrounded by a cohort of much unnamed ugliness.
Ken Adam’s down-at-heel designs, perhaps, a spare contrast to his usual extravagances, messy, dirty, uninvolving and unobtrusive, here rather than being impressive, they add character, contrast and shape to individual sequences.
The smallest details, perhaps: Palmer and ‘House Martin’ mirror-imaged walking the balconies of the Science Museum, Palmer removing his specs before a fist-fight, the US agent following ‘Blue Jay’, the backhanded assistance between the Secret Services and the Met Police, Palmer’s disrespect for routine red tape, his spartan domestic arrangements, recipes stuck on cupboard doors, Mozart on the turntable, the plaque for Dalby’s section ironically reading ‘Domestic Employees Bureau’, his secretary endlessly smoking, the colour ‘red’ recurring as a more and more obvious Freudian clue, the days scratched in sevens on a prison cell wall, our introduction to the duplicitous love interest comes over her shoulder – like Cary Grant in Notorious – what is she hiding other than her shapely legs? – and Palmer searches for his automatic and finds it not under his pillow but even further down his bed than last night’s lady’s cheap bracelet.
Peter Hunt’s editing, perhaps, which cuts effectively and without puzzlement from scene to scene, evoking tension, drama and excitement in equal measure.
Gordon Jackson, Sue Lloyd, Stanley Meadows, Freda Bamford, Thomas Baptiste and the rest of the solid support cast, perhaps, who provide Harry Palmer with just enough to trouble him or to relax him, depending on how much cooking, boxing, loving, shooting or investigating he’s done.
The sheer sixties coolness of the thing, perhaps, a window onto an indefinable cultural moment, a slice of cinema that reminds us times may have been rough, but societal change was afoot in the mid-sixties, class war was rife, prudishness was diminishing, the Cold War was functioning, technology was rising, everyday life was altering for good or bad for everyone, yet in the midst of it all, people smoked, drank, loved, laughed and died for causes unseen or unspoken and sometimes, just sometimes, a movie magically conjures those moments and wraps them in a pretty brown paper parcel so that we can only wonder, just wonder, was it really all as marvellously swinging, yet scrupulously decrepit as this?
A fantastic spy film on every level.
Bloody loved it, as Harry Palmer – or Michael Caine – might say.
FUNERAL IN BERLIN (1966)
Not much to add to my review which originally featured on the Last Film Seen... thread. Perhaps, most interestingly, the film is much better to enjoy and easier to follow than the book. It also dispenses with the silly fireworks ending and instead ensures the Nazi hunting angle takes precedence. Deighton doesn't seem to understand the potential of that theme and is more interested in how Johnny Vulkan's West Berlin dealings affect the British end of things in London. While I don't see Funeral... as a classic spy thriller like I do Ipcress... it is a damn sight better than the novel ! Oscar Homolka is excellent.
While The Ipcress File was wowing them at Cannes, providing Michael Caine with a career launch pad playing a downbeat British special agent of dubious skills, Martin Ritt was going even more downbeat with John Le Carre’s even more anti-OO7 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Filmed in noirish monochrome and dominated by a brutal performance from Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an agent who never quite seems to understand whose side he’s supposed to be on, Le Carre’s vision of spy work was far more morose than Len Deighton’s. I mention this because in part Funeral in Berlin covers similar territory to Ritt’s film, beginning and concluding with escapes across the Berlin Frontier.
The Wall was still fairly new in 1965/66 so it probably had a certain fascination for filmgoers [JFK and “Ich bin ein Berliner” and all that]. Director Guy Hamilton, fresh from Goldfinger, utilises his Berlin locations to demonstrate a genuine sense of a city indulging in Weimar tastes, extravagance and decadence while teetering on the verge of chaos. The hotels are swish, the nightclubs bawdy and the women slinky and sexually available. Despite this, the look of the movie is not as innovative as its forebear. Hamilton only uses those slanted angles when Palmer meets his superior, Colonel Ross, which is a bit like Batman meeting his villains. It is a remarkably ordinary looking film. Guy Doleman is good once again as Ross, tending his garden of weeds, which he likens to marauding refugees – much like the desperate people jumping the wall.
As with Ipcress, Deighton’s original novel is slimmed down for narrative coherence and here the finished story revolves around the defection of a senior Soviet colonel and a band of interfering Zionist agents seeking war criminals. Palmer has his eyes on every prize and second guesses his way to a suitable conclusion. He’s aided by virtually nobody. This is spy V spy V spy V spy. The film opens like West Side Story, a snatched series of scenes showing the day-to-day street life of Berlin, before the camera settles on the barren tract of land near the wall, where all is quiet and life has ceased to exist. A daring Modesty Blaise style escape, or a James Bond enterprise for OHMSS, involving a construction bucket, welcomes the martial music of the titles. Konrad Elfers orchestral score is below par. It is at its best when we don’t hear it. Ken Adam is still on hand, but the editing has been shovelled to John Bloom, and the cast isn’t as interesting.
Palmer is dispatched to Berlin on a Saturday morning. He doesn’t like being disturbed at the weekend and tells his messenger boy such. “You really work on that insubordinate stuff, don’t you,” says his pyjama top clad squeeze, who is making him very bad coffee – nothing like his efforts in Ipcress. Palmer’s not impressed by his orders or by her, well, he likes the view of her legs: “You’re useless in the kitchen; why don’t you get back in bed.” About as anti-Bond as you can get: a frank way of checking his watch after telling his boss he’s going to be late. The woman later turns out to be one of Ross’ secretaries; now James Bond never went there either.
In Berlin, we learn a little more about Palmer’s past, a stores swindle which landed him in a military prison, but kept his partner in crime Johnny Vulkan at leisure. Like Palmer, Vulkan is indebted to Colonel Ross, although his underwear business also nets him a tidy profit. Vulkan is a slippery customer from the get-go. As is slinky sexy lingerie model Samantha Steel – Eva Renzi, very nice, but dubbed by Nikki Van Der Zyl, so I kept thinking she sounded like Honey Rider / Ursula Andress. Oskar Homolka delivers a riotous turn as the double-crossing old Bolshevik Colonel Stok. Hugh Burden has the key role of the inside man, already under suspicion because he’s a homosexual, and losing his loyalties faster than the bodies can pile up.
The film is solid rather than spectacular. It doesn’t do anything wrong, but it lacks the sparkle which made Ipcress such a starkly, sleek and impressive outing. Berlin tries to be seedy, tries to be dangerous, but you never have the impression Palmer is in any peril. Michael Caine carries the film well, already displaying his star quality, but only Doleman and Homolka are giving him any support. The screenplay is flat and its humour entirely misplaced – an early reference to Batman clouds it in a pop culture reference that both dates the film and makes a faintly obvious point: that spies don’t have a ton of secret special gadgets. The writer is trying to tell us we are not watching James Bond, but simply by doing so he acknowledges a debt to the genre and makes his own task more difficult.
There is plenty to enjoy, despite the low key action, but it is mostly in the early sections as Palmer negotiates his way around Vulkan, Stok, Samantha, the Berlin police, Ross, Kreutsmann and the transexuals at a cabaret. The secondary plot about Nazi hunters and the war criminal Paul Louis Bloum serves to add intrigue but fails to generate any extra tension. The film ends in an underwhelming confrontation close to the Wall. Nobody seems to have won this particularly grubby game, which feels remarkably similar to Martin Ritt and John Le Carre’s viewpoint in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
There’s a lot of love for this on IMDB. Reviewers hark on about how realistic and earthy it is, how they identify with the Cold War setting. Personally, I find the lack of panache dates the film irrevocably. Unlike Ipcress, which has a stylised and identifiable look, one that allows it to boldly escape the confines of its decade, Funeral in Berlin could only have been made in the sixties and it remains there, a dour and rather unimaginative time capsule.
One of my favourites, and I like it more than "Ipcress" except for the music as you'd expect. Sir Mike inhabits Harry 100% and gives more of an impression that he's in control (or at least understands) the events and characters than in the previous movie or the next, in both of which he's more often than not buffeted around by them.
Yes, the plot is trimmed compared to the novel and I also love old Homolka who pretty much steals the film. I do rate it more highly than you, Chris, though a lot of that is nostalgia. I'm not looking back the same way, since I read the book and saw the film when I was very young back in the sixties (unlike being in my sixties like now).
Paul Hubschmid wasn't bad as Vulkan, though there's less there than in the book. I spotted him years after seeing this starring in
made over ten years earlier. He was of course younger and using a different name ("Paul Christian") and it took me a while to recognise him.
Eva Renzi was pretty bad as Samantha, but helped by our old pal Nikki as you said above.
I never quite understand the criticism that a reference or style has dated: it wasn't being made for today. Like Barbel I tend to prefer Funeral: I just find the plot more interesting. I can't disagree that Ipcress is the more historic work, with more style, but at times I find that style of it rather oppressive, all the dutch angles and CCTV-esque camera positions draw attention to themselves and begin to feel pretentious. It is much more cool than Funeral, but it also really knows it.
As Barbel says, I love the characterisation of Harry in Funeral. The way he plays it as if he's on the back foot, passive and being played by everyone else but behind the scenes is actually working the plan to his advantage. They keep this up in the next film too, showing they did understand their main character. I also agree with Barbel about Caine here: he's become a real star in the meantime since the last film and Harry is such a perfect part for him: that apparent passive quality means he just has to use his eyes very subtly - he underpays it brilliantly. I don't think the Broum plot is a subplot at all: it's what's been behind the whole thing. The idea that the macguffin is the legend that our hero spy is sent out to the mission using as his own alias is a brilliant idea, I love it.
It is more of the 'solid' entry in the series whereas Ipcress is the transcendent classic, I can certainly see that (in terms of a time capsule I love the supermarket scene in Ipcress: that we have this character who is so appalled by this 'American' concept!) but it's Funeral which I return to more.
And the "Bitte?" joke is an all-time classic.
Thanks for the input @Barbel @emtiem very much appreciated - always good to have alternative viewpoints.
Quickly rolling on...
BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (1967)
Also reviewed a few months back on the Last Film Seen thread, Billion Dollar Brain came quickly on the heels of its source novel, which may explain why the film seems so disjointed. Ken Russell never made any other film like it before or since. I enjoy the flshy, trashy feel he conveys. You can tell he isn't taking things very seriously while all his actors are being asked to play things straight, accepting the sojourn to Latvia which is high farce and unsuccessful high farce at that. Russell couldn't do spies and frankly, he couldn't do comedy either. Like Deighton's novel, the film starts brightly but becomes frayed around the edges by the time the big villain appears. It is only the force of Ed Begley's General Midwinter that keeps me watching. Fine visuals, but then Deighton has fine descriptions. I fail to see why Harry Palmer was taken out of the SIS and portrayed as a private detective [although he gets rehired]. Far easier to simply have him retired or something; the first scene doesn't feel like Harry Palmer at all - no fancy food, no pretty flat and even prettier bedmate, no classical music, no coffee grinder - and you wonder if Russell watched the forst two films before he took the directing job. Still, I enjoy the whole disfunctional mess, finding it lively and intriguing, despite being faintly ridiculous.
Billion Dollar Brain kicks off with Colonel Ross infiltrating the H.P. Detective Agency. This pokey office is, one assumes, in Soho; the flickering red and blue lights suggest it. The exterior is actually on Pentonville Road. The office doubles as Harry Palmer’s digs. He’s come down in the world quite a bit since The Ipcress File: sleeping in his office, unmade beds, convenience food, dishes unwashed, a tip and a life of disastrous proportions. Chasing infidelities doesn’t suit Palmer and Ross knows it. He wants Palmer back in the Secret Service, but the two don’t see eye to eye. Instead, having sent his ex-boss away with a flea in his ear, Palmer receives a package containing a wedge of money and a ticket to Helsinki, simultaneously answering a metallic, pre-recorded telephone message offering him carriage instructions to Finland.
It isn’t entirely clear why Palmer has to be a free agent. He wasn’t in the novel, which has a plausible explanation for sending our Harry to Finland, and he really isn’t a free agent here either – Ross follows his errant ex-employee and re-enlists him to retrieve the vacuum flask Palmer abandoned with his Finnish contacts. The flask contains half a dozen eggs, each one infected with a deadly virus, a product of the UK’s Porton Down research facility. This chemical and biological evil is irrelevant to the evolving plot, a cute McGuffin which Palmer, and we, think is important, but leads us nowhere.
More pertinent is Palmer’s old acquaintance Leo Newbigen, a character written out of the film version of Funeral in Berlin, whose young mistress, Anya, takes an obvious like to the cocky Englishman. These two cunning operators appear to be perfecting an uprising in Latvia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Newbigen demonstrates the global-spanning ‘Brain’, a computer which gives him remote orders, sent from Texas and the headquarters of the Crusade for Freedom, an anti-Communist pro-capitalist nationalist army and scientific society orchestrated operatically by the oil magnate General Midwinter. The ‘Brain’ orders the elimination of a suspected enemy agent: Anya. Meanwhile, another old friend, Colonel Stok, seems to know more about Harry, Midwinter and the uprising than anybody. It seems Palmer’s troubles are only just beginning.
Billion Dollar Brain gets a casual dismissal from most armchair critics, but that’s a trifle unfair. True, it isn’t as engaging as Ipcress, nor does it have the grounded, earthy feel of Funeral. What it does have is a wider Cold War scope, which encompasses both the fantastically imaginative and the same old double-dealing which prevaricates most espionage scenarios. Here it is Leo Newbigen, played with some enthusiasm by Karl Malden, and Anya – the delicately beautiful Francoise Dorleac, who was tragically killed in a car accident immediately after filming her role – who impersonate the villainous tricksters. A more straightforward bad guy is the believably insane Ed Begley, who inhabits General Midwinter with all the gusto and righteous anger of an evangelist preacher: “My arm is long and my vengeance is total!” He spouts vitriol, pride, avarice, common sense, conspiracy theory, the Word of the Lord and complete lunacy, sometimes all in one sentence. Midwinter is as unhinged as any Bond villain. In fact, he’s a damn sight better than many of them. Midwinter frightens because he’s so palpably real, disconnected from the outside world, consumed by his own modern crusade, fascinated with his personal achievements, bound by the gun and the sword, the General is one small roaring step away from starting a nuclear war. What is so good about Begley’s portrayal, unlike a similarly manic Stephen Berkoff in Octopussy, is the unsentimental pontificating. Berkoff’s General Orlov was devious, deluded and, occasionally, stroppy; a schoolboy denied his toys. Midwinter is the fully grown man, certain of his belief system, enthralled by the adoration of his retinue, subsumed by his own cult of forceful personality. This is exactly the kind of madness which starts wars and slaughters thousands and millions. Strange too, from a modern perspective, that it is incorrect misinformed data which advises Midwinter his plans are succeeding, and that he continues his campaign even when confronted with [for him] the unpalatable truth. Here is a true lunatic of the grandest scale, parading beneath a winged MW symbol that has all the associations of fascism, double-headed eagles and military iron. Begley’s robust, violent, virulent, non-stop performance is astounding. He drives the film forward at the very moment it was starting to flounder. Michael Caine too seems to come alive at this point and Harry Palmer ceases to be a bemused cheeky chappie and morphs back into the wily, verbally slick secret agent we know and love him to be.
The film is strong visually. Cinematographer Billy Williams does some good work with the snowy Finnish landscapes. The slow moving ice floes of Helsinki’s Capital Region form a portent of disaster to come. Director Ken Russell occasionally pulls out some startling scenes, although he’s not as innovative as Sidney J. Furie, erring to bombast rather than subtlety. The eerie, crystal hued visit to Dr Kaarna’s mansion is one; our first sight of Dorleac, in close up, whispering a password is another; the intercut preparations and inspections of Midwinter’s army a third; the fiery Texas hoedown an incongruous fourth highlight; he even handles the billion dollar computer set with some aplomb. Russell, being an emotionally over the top director, lets his camera linger on Ed Begley and Oskar Homolka’s out of the box performances, and rightly so. There is frequent criticism that he didn’t understand the plot, but that surely is a question for the screenwriter and John McGrath’s adaptation does have holes in it, but no more than the Berlin Wall or an Albanian torture chamber. In fact, the holes are mostly where we came in, with that nest of eggs, a chancel which causes the most confusion. The film benefits from, I feel, repeated viewing.
The central theme from Richard Rodney Bennett is excellent, although he comes unstuck dramatically. Producer Harry Saltzman utilises old friend Maurice Binder to cut a half decent main titles sequence. A fourth film [Horse Under Water] was planned as part of an eleven picture deal Caine made with the producer and his Lowndes Productions company, but apparently the poor returns on this one scuppered that – it disappointed in the U.S. market, hardly a surprise given the less than flattering portrait offered of American espionage expertise. Like the takings, Billion Dollar Brain feels like an underachievement. When it’s good, it’s very good, but much of the middle portion is unbalanced by the confused plot and an inappropriate sense of slapstick. It needed straightening out. Ken Russell and editor Alan Osbiston were not up to the task. I wonder what Peter Hunt might have made of it.
Anyway, I enjoyed it. Good fun, I feel.
Very impressive review, thanks @chrisno1. I'm with you most of the way. This is my favourite of the series and I've watched it many times.
Little factoids- the voice of the titular Brain is Donald Sutherland, who has a brief part as a technician. Susan George can be spotted on a train. It took many years to be released on home video owing to a quick excerpt from Beatles music which would have been prohibitively expensive to licence and has now been inaudibly and invisibly excised. The postman at the start is Caine's brother Stanley.
I am very fond of Bennett's music here, and just had to have the OST album. I do like the book but feel this to be one of those rare instances of the film being better.And yes, Ed Begley's performance is extraordinary. He and Homolka (again) steal the entire film from their younger and higher billed (and presumably higher paid) costars.
PS Yes, there are holes in the plot large enough to drive one of Midwinter's tankers through. Just like most if not all James Bond films.
I did not know that about Donald Sutherland, and yet now you say that I can recognise his voice immediately!
I'm fond of this one too. It's probably the least of the three for me, after a strong start I feel like it falls apart quite rapidly, but there's still loads to love in there. I really like the whole sequence where Harry is abducted by the Russians to meet Stok, the wilds of Finland look amazing together with RRB's lovely spooky, ethereal score, Caine is as great as always and looks supercool in this one too (there's a couple of moments where he does some insanely dangerous and yet visually unimpressive stunts: he hops on the icy step of a moving train: potential death! And then later he jumps between floating lumps of ice on a frozen lake- if he'd gone in he'd be dead there too!), and much like in Funeral, Harry is kind of the passive observer, being shunted around between different protagonists, and yet underneath his mind is ticking away the whole time. He's kind of like the spy Columbo. As Chris mentioned the whole Midwinter situation is fantastic. He's played brilliantly because he feels so dangerous (the zany costumes maybe undermine the threat here) - like the Broum documents in the last one, I absolutely love the story idea of a villain who is basically on our side, and yet must be stopped because his overzealous passion threatens everything. Weirdly it feels even more possible today with the billionaire nutjobs we have around now. I'm surprised we haven't seen that lifted more by other films- Chris is right that Octopussy has the reverse version (which I hadn't spotted before- and of course that means Fourth Protocol has it too as Forsyth stole the plot!) but I think I kind of prefer it this way around.
I feel like it has more flat spots than the other two and the pace flags a few times, but there's still loads to enjoy. And somehow "Hello. Who is this?" has kind of become mine and my friends' idea of Harry's catchphrase for some reason!
@emtiem wrote:
and much like in Funeral, Harry is kind of the passive observer, being shunted around between different protagonists, and yet underneath his mind is ticking away the whole time.
This is an exceptionalky valid observation which I have neglected to include in my reviews, but it is certainly true of both Funeral and Billion $ Brain. It is much more how Deighton writes the unnamed protagonist of the novels. Caine has developed quickly as an actor, I feel, and represents this excellently. It would be interesting to know if he had a hand in the cinema version's mannerisms, dialogues, etc, as while his performance in Ipcress is admirable and works within the strata of that film, there Palmer sometimes has a tendency to shift from intelligent to obtuse through startled. Palmer goes through the mill quite a bit in Ipcress, but Caine isn't quite as natural in some scenes as he is in others. That can't be said of the two follow ups.
Yeah I think it's interesting that we get that in both Funeral and Brain: the makers had obviously identified that's how Palmer functions and what makes him different to other screen spies.
good analyses of the books and films Chris!
after three or four years of searching I've finally found DVDs of Funeral in Berlin and (a year later) Billion Dollar Brain. Ipcress File still eludes me. For some reason the DVDs of these three films are very hard to find.
Ipcress should be the easiest to find, I'm surprised. I bought it on Blu Ray in a Network sale, sadly they've gone now though.
Sad to hear that the voice of the Billion Dollar Brain himself (which I only learned today thanks to Barbel!) Donald Sutherland has passed away.
Yes, sad to hear about him. A veteran of many memorable movies.
I join the salute to Donald Sutherland - voice of 'The Billion Dollar Brain'
And moving on, no poster for this one, just the DVD cover, whcih I notice is a Touchstone release. Disney has come a long way...
BULLET TO BEIJING (1995)
Michael Caine ranked his experience of making this film and its follow up Midnight in St Petersburg as so terrible he vowed never to make a movie again. Some vow. He was back within a year alongside Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine and has only just announced a more likely permanent retirement in 2023, almost thirty years on. He was 61 when he made the film which revisits his break out role of Harry Palmer.
Bullet to Beijing is no masterpiece of cinema. In fact the producers considered it so poor they shovelled it out as a television movie. That’s a trifle unjust, although the movie does compare unfavourably to Goldeneye, the Bond entry of the same year. What is noticeable is that Caine’s Harry Palmer retains a working class chip on his shoulder and while his actions and reactions may be physically slower – even a resigned shrug at his summary dismissal from the British Secret Service seems achingly conveyed – his mind is still working as sharp as it did in the 1960s. Caine presents Harry Palmer as a weary observer of life and all its dubious character. He’s still chasing Sue Lloyd’s Jean, still tied to his spectacles, still equipped with a cheeky response to an unexpected question, still offering laconic glances over changing faces, his own countenance indefatigable and inscrutable. I enjoy this older version of Harry, a man clearly attempting to cling to his youth, but recognising youth really does do things better or at least with more urgency and less fear. So he turns down the opportunity of midnight passion with ice maiden Mia Sara in favour of breakfast and information. The story is populated by old spies and spy networks, all creaking and groaning under the new freedoms of Glasnost. It looks much like an easy and only excuse to employ some over the hill actors like Michael Sarrazin and Burt Kwok. Michael Gambon makes a brief impression as one of the new breed of gangster oligarchs, Alexei Alexeyevich, or Alex for short.
The plot involves the assassination of a Russian chemist in London during a demonstration outside the North Korean Embassy. Harry witnesses the killing, but after filing his report and requesting to pursue the case, his superior, Col Wilson [Patrick Allen] retires him on a pauper’s pension. Instead, Harry takes a freelance role in St Petersburg, chiefly because he has been given a free air ticket and an envelope full of US dollars. There he is followed and almost killed by Chechen rebels, although why is never made entirely clear. It makes for a diverting river boat chase though. His contact is Jason Connery, who as Nikolai proves once again that he is not a touch on his dad in the acting stakes. It later transpires Nikolai may be Palmer’s son, but the British agent denies it. Luckily this revelation comes much too late to spoil proceedings, which could have descended into a dire secret service version of Indy & the Last Crusade. Instead, Harry sponges around the city meeting old friends and contacts of the espionage game, most of them retired, all of them on a take of some kind and some of them out to play Harry Palmer for a fool.
But Harry Palmer is no fool, he never was and he still isn’t. Alex wants Harry to find out who has stolen the formula for a biological weapon called Alorex and the hunt leads Harry to take the cross continental bullet train to Beijing where all his old foes and friends start to crawl out of the sidings. I enjoyed the early section of the film, where the incidents seem to pile on top of poor Harry Palmer, making it a sort of modern picaresque picture as he stumbles out of one crisis and into another. Strange things continue to occur to Harry – being tossed off a train, crashlanding an Antonov airplane, threatened with poisoning – yet he always seems both distracted and one step ahead – you can tell from the way Caine indicates matters with a flick of the lip, a sly eye roll, a deep gaggle of laughter. If his enemies believe they are playing Harry Palmer, they have it all wrong, for he is just as adept at playing them.
The eventual reveal is clever, but leaves several questions unanswered and this doesn’t help our enjoyment. The basic storyline is easy to follow, but the extra characters and the interwoven stories fail to hold up. I was reminded of The Living Daylights as the gist of the villain’s plan seems to be not about selling biological warfare secrets but about exporting heroin for massive profit. I got thoroughly lost during the scenes onboard the bullet train. It seemed very strange to have three cohorts of people working for the same person, none of whom are aware the others exist, and this aspect of the story wasn’t satisfactorily explained at all. Nor were the early gunbattles involving the Chechens. The scenes on the bullet train where Palmer uncovers the secret cache of weapons in a packing case in the cargo car reminded me of an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie where he keeps opening coffins on a train in the search for a fantastic diamond. I anticipated Col Wilson reappearing at the end to offer Palmer his job back, but this wheel of fortune was overlooked. The finale is plenty messy anyway and makes no obvious sense simply because we can’t tell who is shooting at who and why.
The movie was written by Peter Welbeck, a pseudonym for the producer Harry Alan Towers. Towers was most famous for making cheap, quick knock off movies in Hong Kong and Europe, stuff like the sixties Fu Manchu cycle. He promoted them as big budget spectacles, but they were not. His script is functional at best. Sadly, no actor really seizes the mantle, preferring to slum it and run, so the project flounders most of the time, even if it has an interesting premise and a starry sounding cast.
Bullet to Beijing is not the disaster critics and Michael Caine would have you believe, but it doesn’t gratify in the way the sixties Harry Palmer films did, lacking a cynical edge, a decent music score and any fun, elegantly framed photography. It is spectacularly ordinary, which is a complement of sorts, but only makes us wish for a movie with a little more substance. It might have been better had the producers persuaded Len Deighton to tighten up the script, but although the author’s name appeared on some promotional material, he had no connection with the film at all. Bullet to Beijing remains a disappointing lost opportunity to reignite a successful film series.
If you think this one is bad, wait for the next....
Edit: No, that's unfair- Average. Fair to middling. Undistinguished. etc etc
I haven't seen it since the 90s, I just remember it being very hard to enjoy. Not the worst film I've ever seen no, but just not good at all and I remember struggling to recognise Harry in it. Midnight I do remember being a lot worse.
There's a fun bit where they're going to throw Harry off the train and he says "Can we wait for a slow bit?". That was good. That's it.
Another DVD cover. I have been storing these reviews up until I caught this one on telly. It appears periodically on those Great Action / Legend / Crap TV channels...
MIDNIGHT IN SAINT PETERSBURG (1996)
The credits to this straight-to-video thriller sequel proudly declare this is Len Deighton’s Midnight in Saint Petersburg. I don’t know how the author felt about being given responsibility for such a so-so slice of entertainment, but having just read his four ‘Harry Palmer’ novels I can attest that screenwriter Peter Welbeck at least attempts to create the atmosphere of a Len Deighton 1960s thriller. Welbeck is a pseudonym for film producer Harry Alan Towers, a notorious penny-pincher who had international success with cheap and cheerful knock-off jobs usually filmed in Hong Kong. The films cost little but made money in foreign markets in fleapit cinemas. Occasionally he’d have genuine success; Fu Manchu mostly. Towers, or Welbeck if you like, has clearly understood what makes a Len Deighton novel tick, so he has Micheal Caine’s disinterested Harry Palmer wandering in and out of St Petersburg and Moscow high and low life while his actions seem to have little bearing on the investigation he’s charged with. Harry isn’t in the SIS anymore; he’s heading up a detective agency in Moscow – perhaps with the cooperation of a retired colonel Stok, who always seemed to like him – but is making enemies quicker than clients. His private-eye status has made him a less obnoxious individual, but he’s still clutching at straws for clues, some so thin we [and he, one assumes] can’t see them; chiefly because Welbeck, like Deighton, doesn’t telegraph them, nor even whisper it, he simply buries it somewhere and never mentions it. Like Deighton’s work, Midnight in Saint Petersburg suffers not so much from overcomplication [it isn’t complicated] but from a lack of decent explanation as to how lucky Harry Palmer solves the case. Luck, then, perhaps?
Chief culprits, as in the novels, are the support characters, friends and enemies who come and go with little or no introduction and exit. Let’s meet Louis – Louis who? Never know. Let’s meet Boris – Boris who? Never told. Let’s meet Brandy – Brandy who? – a journalist apparently, Palmer shows no surprise at her fortuitous appearances, much as he does with everybody in the books. Colonel Kornikov, Hans Schreiber, Feodor Zavarin, who? who? who? I could go on. Palmer even has a series of telephone calls between himself and his private investigation team back in Moscow, who do a ton of research for him without ever leaving the confines of their office. He could just as easily be calling Jean and Alice and Dawlish in London. Micheal Sarrazin and Lev Prygunov return as his pals Craig and Gradsky. We also re-meet Micheal Gambon’s Alexei Alexeyevich and Anotoli Davydov’s Yuri Stephanovich, the two competing Russian mafioso encountered in the previous sequel Bullet to Beijing. It’s almost impossible to keep up with who is who and what they are all doing. While the plot is basically quite simple, Towers / Welbeck’s inspiration is to make it like a Deighton novel, so the narrative makes it difficult with a series of dead end scenes that don’t tell us very much about anything. Usually, at the point we think Harry Palmer should be getting answers the people he questions either die or simply don’t provide an answer. Michael Caine looks suitably frustrated by this constant turn of events.
The movie isn’t helped by having to give sidekick Jason Connery something to do. So his ballerina girlfriend, Tatiana, is kidnapped and he spends most of the movie forlornly trying to find her. The man responsible is German terrorist Hans Schreiber. Tatiana’s father happens to be the curator at the Hermitage Museum; Schreiber blackmails him into exchanging $5million-worth of art for his daughter. Schreiber plans to sell the paintings to antique expert Armand Vestry, who in turn will collect a hefty insurance reward. The $5m will be paid by Schreiber to Alexei Alexeyevich in return for 1000g of stolen weapons grade plutonium. A secret message delivered to Harry Palmer asks for his help in recovering the plutonium and the whole spider’s web of intrigue unfurls like a spinning yarn. While it is never made explicitly clear, it seems Harry Palmer has been employed by the Saint Petersburg police, whose chief appears most grateful for the recovery of the paintings and the plutonium !
The film isn’t doing very much. Visually, it is a shoddy piece of work. It looks as cheap as it is. Michael Caine doesn’t remove his overcoat[s] for the entire length of the film. Some of the actors don’t just talk on the phone, they phone their performances in. Nobody seems very interested in making the project anything more than it is: a cheap knock-off job. I’m rather disappointed. All the money saving devices – same crew, locations, sets, etc – fail to convince. In its efforts to pay homage to Deighton, the film lurches from scene to scene with a line or two of pithy dialogue and an occasional tryst of action. The legacy of Harry Palmer is sadly suffering a terminal decline.
I have nothing more to add other than to mention that the film’s runtime is phenomenally short at just 86 minutes. Let us be thankful for short mercies then.
I’ve never seen Midnight In Saint Petersburg all the way through…even at it’s mercifully short 86 min run time…Michael Caine is usually watchable at the very least…but I just couldn’t watch this shoddy film to the end…as you say, the production values are nonexistent, and you do wonder if they actually had a budget for this? 🤷🏻♂️
I'm sure I read somewhere (can't quote a source, this was a long time ago) that the second of these films "Midnight" was made from outtakes from the first, "Bullet". I don't know the truth of this, but it's believable.
Not sure it was, but it certainly feels like it
Apparently these films were shot back-to-back…so it’s possible that outtakes were used to complete “Midnight” 🤔