Do you get all your equipment from Kellogs?

Ken Russell’s film of BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN, deliriously wacky though it is, is actually closer to Len Deighton’s source novel than the previous movies in the Harry Palmer series, apart from the ending. (Deighton’s climax is even grimmer than a LeCarre: as ever with this series, the filmmakers have sought something punchier, but even here, the big Finnish finish is suggested by a speech in the novel.)

But the opening scene is all new — series regular Guy Doleman as Colonel Ross (mentioned only once in the book) breaks into the HP Detective Agency — above a surgical appliance shop, reached via a dismal neon-lit stair yowling with cats — and performs a search. Herky-jerky handheld shot follows a flashlight beam and reminds me of the search in BLADE RUNNER that turns up a snake scale in the bath, filmed in a similar way because Harrison Ford wasn’t available for a reshoot. Excellent gag, reminiscent of REAR WINDOW and CHINATOWN both — a filing cabinet marked DIVORCE yields two photos, one of a couple surprised in bed, the other of the chap swinging his fist at the lens. The next drawer down contains a smashed camera.HP himself (Michael Caine) arrives, armed, and Doleman spills Corn Flakes over the floor when he raises his hands. Jump cut to Caine shoveling it up, at Doleman’s feet (again). MI5 want Palmer back. He refuses. A package arrives — a key and money. The phone rings. Computer voice gives Palmer instructions —JUMP CUT! Palmer’s trademark spectacles LEAP off his face into the foreground as computer font lettering flickers and Caine, in the background, squints at his suddenly displaced specs. Richard Rodney Bennett is freaking out on piano like a drunken Rachmaninoff and lots of little Caines are voguing about in strange loops — it’s a particularly brilliant Maurice Binder title sequence, sans naked silhouettes but giving the distinct impression that this installment will be splashier, more sexy and exotic, more Bondian, than its predecessors. But the pre-creds sequence also assures us that our hero remains an underdog.

Palmer picks up a package. A thermos. He takes it to a shoeshop and subjects it to the Pedoscope — I am old enough to remember, dimly, X-ray machines in shoeshops. A brilliant idea — lets you see if your toes are cramped, in case you can’t feel it. Also gives you foot cancer, I suspect. Palmer’s thermos is full of eggs. In the book, he’s just given eggs. This is better — adds another layer of mystery, and the  just leaves things more mysterious. I’d like to make the first film shot entirely in Pedoscope.

Our clever screenwriter is Scots playwright John McGrath, who also co-wrote PLAY DIRTY for Andre DeToth, here a producer — De Toth’s bio is full of good Ken Russell stories. The whole business of Palmer no longer being at MI5 is McGrath’s invention too — and it actually makes him being recruited by another organisation more plausible.

Palmer’s instructions pack him off to Helsinki, where Francoise Dorleac gets a brilliant introduction. A tiny “big wheel” spins against the low sun. It’s second rotation flips the camera off into a fast pan that finds Caine, waiting for his contact. Sudden, dazzling Francoise close-up, speaking right into the lens. No context for where she is. Back to longshot, Caine turns, she’s behind him. Very MOD. Uses confusion as a means to attain clarity in a more exciting way. A bit like the eggs in the thermos, only in terms of mise-en-scene. Deighton’s Signe in the book is now the more pronounceable Anya, but she’s the same crazy bitch. Dorleac being marginally older than the character means she has less excuse for her extreme flakiness and so she’s correspondingly less sympathetic.

Shakicam ski-bike ride to an isolated sauna and Karl Malden — this is the movie that gives you Francoise Dorleac, swathed in furs outside a sauna, and Karl Malden naked inside it. In the book, he’s Harvey Newbegin (great name, if obvious) but since our nameless spy is now a Harry, in the movie he has to be Leo Newbegin, which will take some getting used to.

Dorleac is reprising her role from CUL DE SAC, as the fickle tramp who’s lured a wealthy middle-aged man away from his stable marriage. Malden’s slightly crazed gusto perfectly suits the role, as he seems desperate for Palmer to approve his new love match. Palmer has just snogged Dorleac and so is a bit skeptical.A most original conception, your majesty — the birth of Venus.

Russell & McGrath get through exposition joyously — Caine is discomfited by nudity in the first section, then lounges in a bubble chair looking fatuous with a cigar while Dorleac drones tunelessly on a cello and Billy Williams’ camera soaks up Syd Cain’s design. Williams would follow Russell onto WOMEN IN LOVE, which was the reason he was making this in the first place. Amazing design as Palmer discovers a corpse — in the book, the scene is a laboratory in an apartment. Here, it’s a mansion walled in classy porn and jungled up with potted plants — hilarious, beautiful and surreal. The body (a fat one) is slumped facing an open window so his face is frosted. Then Palmer is chloroformed.

He wakes up in the back half of a car in front of a process screen. Rear projection never works in colour/widescreen movies of this time, but Russell gets some added value out of it by pulling out from the grainy street footage and panning onto Caine, so it’s like he’s woken up in a movie. Ross threatens to frame Palmer for the previous scene’s murder, and he’s forcibly recruited back into Her Maj’s Secret Service, to spy on Malden’s organisation from within.A spacious loft set — one of numerous vaulted chambers of this design in Russell’s oeuvre. The titular brain is mentioned, but all we see is a desktop terminal. Spurious drama — Malden is ordered to shoot Dorleac. He doesn’t.REPORT TO TEXAS FOR INDOCTRINATION

Shock cut from hockey mask to multiplying bacilli suggest Russell was impressed by PETULIA the previous year. I think Mad Ken and Richard Lester were checking out each other’s work, influenced but also rejecting a lot of influence. I think they both felt the need to keep track of what the other was up to.Palmer is flown to Latvia with Vladek Sheybal, a Russell favourite. On a train — a teenage Susan George, Caine’s future co-star (THE JIGSAW MAN). And we meet Oscar Homolka in a scene containing broad farcical elements which is nevertheless straight from the book. Homolka was a memorable presence in FUNERAL IN BERLIN so it’s lovely to have him back, cackling insanely, an avuncular dumpling you nevertheless believe capable of terrible things. Russell was particularly amused by the book’s casting of Americans as villains and Russians as the good guys — he exaggerates it somewhat, as was his wont, but it IS true to the novel.

Here in Latvia the film seems to have lost a Beatles song from its soundtrack — the Latvian “freedom fighters” employed by Malden — his cousins — also traffick in bootleg western goods. I REMEMBER this song from a TV screening.A double-cross — Malden wants Caine dead. And we get the film’s most beautiful image, cossack-like riders emerging from the winter sun. Like the private eye he briefly was, Palmer is knocked unconscious again. An occupational hazard for anyone in the Marlowe racket.

And awakens in a bath-tub full of corpses (the book). Grim comedy hi-jinks — a guard comes in as he’s contemplating escape. Awkward eye contact. The man begins to undress. Uh-oh. Sigh of relief — he’s just come to use the loo. (This is the third scene to wring comedy from men undressing together.) Two more guards enter, rush Caine, seizing and subduing him… soak a towel from the sink… and give his face a nice wash.

Shostakovich — Russell is just wild about all things Russian — limbering up for THE MUSIC LOVERS — a crimson bar, where Sheybal is apprehended and Caine compromised — Dorleac, who travels fast, is snapping the compromat of him being chummy with Homolka using a very obvious but chic spycam.Back to Helsinki — Palmer partners up with Newbegin (who just tried to have him killed) in his scam — claiming massive expenses from crazed American patriot General Midwinter to foment revolution in Latvia — and we’re off to Texas at last!

Except Texas is one place the movie didn’t go — looks like they filmed in Finland and England only — so Middlesex is doubling for Texas. By setting the whole thing at night and making it rather surreal anyway, Russell gets away with this — a sort of Nazi rally/square dance/barbecue — in the book, Midwinter’s organisation is called Facts For Freedom (“The fact free people,” the unnamed spy’s boss calls them) and the three Fs form a sort of grid logo. Russell has the M and W of Midwinter’s name pressed together to form a sort of involuted swastika. Not subtle, this stuff, but satire rarely is. A Trump rally, basically.

Midwinter is a bit subtler in the book too — he’s of Latvian descent and wants to free his former homeland. In the movie, he’s just a nutty American super-patriot. They got rid of his artificial arm, also — too much? What exactly would constitute “too much” in this context? “My arm is long and my vengeance is total!” bellows Ed Begley, eyes aglint with blazing insanity. Very good use of his Humpty Dumpty shape, apart from his egg (torso + head) he seems to be all legs.The brain itself — the facilities of Honeywell (do they still have a building on the road between Edinburgh and Glasgow?). Russell’s love of Lang’s METROPOLIS shines through. The other giveaway that we haven’t crossed the Atlantic is Donald Sutherland, oddly enough, fussing over terminals, at the tail-end of his European sojourn (Perth Rep, various cheapo horrors). His computer “expertise” perhaps earned him his role in SEBASTIAN the following year. Big Bondian set, all greatly amped-up from the book. Here, we begin to conclusively depart from the source, in interests of a big ending —Karl Malden escapes and Caine, about to be shot due to Dorleac’s compromat, strikes a deal with Midwinter to capture him. Two henchmen in stetsons accompany him back to Finland for this purpose. Attractive sequence in greenhouse! Stetson men shot at train station, Dorleac flees, having double-crossed Malden for those eggs (remember those eggs? Imbued with deadly germs stolen from Porton Down, Britain’s biological and chemical weapons facility — just saw a BBC documentary about it). Malden falls weakly into line now with Caine’s plans — must warn Midwinter not to invade Latvia as he’ll start WWIII. (Earlier, Malden has his own crazy moment — WWIII means nothing to him as long as he’s making a profit. Nicely underplayed (yet MASSIVE) moment from Malden, and it strikes me as psychologically acute — there are evidently people who simply refuse to imagine nuclear destruction or climate change.

Happily the movie omits Deighton’s description of Newbegin pressing his nose against a train window. One imagines a vast, ever-spreading pink pancake blotting out the sun if Malden were to attempt this.

The big Finnish finish — Midwinter’s cracker army advances across the ice, so Homolka bombs the ice and sinks them all — all lifted from Eisenstein’s ALEXANDER NEVSKY, but staged with trucks and a really impressive, weirdly fake day for night — I think they just erected black backdrops — it sort of does look like how the scene might be if it were floodlit. Disturbing mass drowning — also kind of funny, in an unpleasant sort of way. General Midwinter dies as he lived — a bellowing dwarf.

Caine awakens draped on the ice floe like Lillian Gish. Somehow the only survivor. Homolka magnanimously returns the eggs and says a dismissive eulogy for the “stupid” Begley. Caine returns to London —The eggs hatch. Amusing coda, not in the book, but Deighton might possibly have considered it if he’d thought of it.

In the novel, our hero assassinates Newbegin to stop him defecting to the Russians. Kind of violates Deighton’s own rule about not letting his hero solve problems with violence — but has he really solved anything? In a way, being forced to kill IS the problem.

 

Key Details

THE KEY is another of these latter-day Carol Reed movies with a shaky reputation: I went in expecting a leaden piece of White Elephant Art, forgetting how much I sometimes enjoy WEA when it’s done with passion and energy. Will nobody stand up for the poor pale pachyderm?

Carl Foreman provides the script, based on Jan de Hartog’s novel, Stella — THE INSPECTOR (aka LISA), also based on a JDH book, covers in some ways similar ground: boats, war, a traumatised girl. This is much better than Philip Dunne’s movie, which was authentically turgid.

Here, things actually build pretty compellingly. The set-up is interesting: tug-boat captains in wartime whose mission is to rescue lame duck ships from the U-boats. Since any ship crippled is written off as a loss, any ship saved is regarded as pure profit, so the work of the tugs is under-appreciated and consequently under-resourced: they have barely any working defenses and no anti-shell plating.

Reed’s dutch tilts look even nicer in widescreen.

The titular key belongs to a flat containing Sophia Loren, and is therefor a highly prized possession, already passed down from slain captain to slain captain several times before its current owner, Trevor Howard, who plays a sozzled old sea-dog not a million leagues from his real-life persona. William Holden plays another captain (he’s enlisted in the Canadian navy before Pearl Harbor) who inherits key, flat and woman when Howard buys it.

The point is, as Holden slowly understands, that this is not a merely commercial arrangement for Loren, but a matter of psychological necessity. After her fiance was killed at sea, she has filled the void with a succession of captains, all standing in for the original. The question for Holden is, can he replace the original loss and be loved for himself? Also, can he avoid going the way of the previous tenants?

If THE MAN BETWEEN served up lots of moody visuals that sometimes felt far more evocative than their surrounding narrative, this movie does build to some powerful dramatic scenes which utilize Malcolm Arnold’s haunting music and Oswald Morris’s astonishing, lambent cinematography to full effect. A scene in which Holden, by now believing himself doomed, seems to see Howard, risen from the grave, gazing balefully at him across the bridge, creates a frisson of true supernatural terror, resolved yet disspelled by a cut which shows the impression to be a trick of the mind —

It’s a trick borrowed from Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE, but it’s even better here. That sharp, low-key sunlight hitting Trev!

Loren, of course, is excellent, with a striking ability to suggest trauma, deep mourning, and compartmentalized psychological spaces unreachable by man. And one has to appreciate any film which gives her a scene with Irene Handl. Howard is splendid, if a little uncomfortable to watch when cosying up to Loren: there’s a pulchritude imbalance that feel’s a touch bestial/necrophilic. And Holden unites the show, progressing into the darker scenes very naturally, as he always did: in a way, it’s his strongest territory, despite his undoubted light comedy skills. Give him a marked man to play and he shone.

Only a slightly episodic start, and an inconclusive ending, mar the movie. Reed’s filming of the sea battles is impressive, with just a couple of models and process shots amid the footage of real vessels captured under unpleasant and risky North Sea conditions. Reed’s best bits often demand a multitude of angles, so there was no way to cut corners here, and the director was also working under the handicap of knowing nothing about ships: he would blithely instruct his submarine commander to surface at a given mark, unaware how impossible this was.

Here’s Oscar Homolka’s best scene! A wonderfully compact actor.

http://vimeo.com/28146223

I’m Looking Through You

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (1940), was a lot more fun than we were expecting! Fiona was particularly taken with the film’s female empowerment stance, which has zesty Goldwyn Girl Virginia Bruce avenging herself on a nasty boss (above) and defeating a whole mob of gangsters single-handed before the hero even arrives on the scene. The gang includes Shemp Howard and is led by Oscar Homolka, a mob boss afflicted with crying jags sixty years before Tony Soprano…

“That’s a lot of money for a dame without a head.”

The fact that VB achieves all this empowerment by taking her clothes off gives the whole rigmarole a modern, post-feminist (ie, mixed up and self-contradictory) feeling, as well as a sexy one. Chris Schneider informs me that an invisible shower scene was considered too racy at the time (Ginnie’s outline picked out by the water spray, presumably) but the film still ends with the hero embracing a naked lady, using the art of mime. (Actually it finally ends in epilogue form with the couple’s adorable baby vanishing while the mad prof declares, “Hereditary!”) The have-your-empowerment-and-eat-it message is so contemporary that a modern remake actually seems like a passable idea.

The mad prof is John Barrymore, whom one should feel sorry for, except he seems to be having the time of his life: he’s over the top even by the standards of the hokum surrounding him.

WAY down the cast list is a speechless Maria Montez, the inaudible in pursuit of the invisible, and the guy being kicked up the arse is Charles Lane. Regular Shadowplayer Chris Schneider suggests I turn to David Ehrenstein for elucidation on the subject of that esteemed performer…