Billion Dollar Brain

I'm a pretty huge James Bond fan.  It all stems from an overnight hospital stay I had as a teenager that happened to coincide with a James Bond marathon on TV; since then, I have seen every Bond at least four times.  This love of James Bond has transferred into a love for the spy genre, both in books and on film.  John Le Carre and Robert Ludlum (in my mind) provide the same level of enjoyment as Derek Flint and Peter Joshua (AKA Alexander Dyle, AKA Adam Canfield, AKA Brian Cruikshank).  Let's just say that I can appreciate spy movies that are serious, campy, or just plain fun.  With that in mind, you might understand my shock when I learned that Michael Caine --- a man who will act in almost anything you ask him to --- starred in a pentalogy (!) of spy movies that I had never heard of.  Even more surprising to me was that most of these films were contemporary to the Sean Connery Bond movies.  Am I just culturally ignorant?  Possibly.  Or is the Harry Palmer spy trilogy just not good enough to have a legacy?

Answer me, you cocky Cockney bastard!

Billion Dollar Brain begins with Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) working as a private detective instead of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  That doesn't last long, though.  Harry receives a mysterious job from a robotic-sounding voice over the phone; he is to take a package to a certain person in Helsinki, Finland.  Coincidentally, my wife (Wifey Vs. Movies, as her family refers to her) once spent a year in Helsinki, but somehow missed Michael Caine.  Anyway, Palmer takes the job, but it's not just a simple delivery.  No, in Helsinki, he meets a beautiful and cryptic Russian babe (Francoise Dorleac) who guides him to his next destination.

Such are the perils of espionage

Along the way, MI5 show up and tell Harry that he needs to pretend to be a double agent to foil the plans of whoever he was hired by.  It turns out that Palmer's contact is an old American spy friend, Leo (Karl Malden).  Like Harry, Leo has quit the employ of his country and is enjoying free enterprise.  The big difference between them is that Leo takes his orders from a super-smart computer, which tells him who to hire for what job, who lives and who dies.

Yeah, I'd take my glasses off, too, in the company of naked Karl Malden

It also turns out that Harry's delivery package is a box of eggs, which carry a ridiculously deadly disease inside them.  Why eggs?  Why not?  But why is Leo taking orders from a machine?  Well, it seems that Leo is working for a crazy Texas billionaire (Ed Begley) who wants to fight Communism.  Billionaires are the most likely people to build billion-dollar computers, so there's you answer.  Can Harry prevent World War III?  Maybe, but the story gets much more convoluted than you might expect.

As far as the acting goes, Billion Dollar Brain is decent.  I was surprised at how charmless the Harry Palmer character was; well, he had a British accent (which goes a long way in America), but the character was fairly blank in this film.  I don't blame Michael Caine for this, because I believe he did a good job given his role, but the script just didn't make Harry very likable.  Karl Malden did a solid job as the conniving, yet workmanlike Leo.  Toward the end, his character got kind of silly, but I blame the script more than Malden here.  Ed Begley was hilariously over the top as the crazy Texan.  If there was a couch in a scene, you can assume he chewed it apart.  While his character was utterly ridiculous, he provided a much-needed jolt in the arm for the film and helped make the final third of the movie silly, but enjoyable.  As for Francoise Dorleac, she's reeeel purrty.  Aside from that...well, she's purrty.

"Ridiculous?!?  I'll 'ridiculous' you...!"

So, how about the direction?  Well, this is definitely better than the last Ken Russell film I watched.  To be fair, though, almost anything is better than the film adaptation of Tommy.  Honestly, I wasn't very impressed with Russell's work here.  He did a decent enough job with the actors, but the story is pretty thin and his editing doesn't make it any easier to understand.  This is a story of double- and triple-crosses, but Russell never really goes very deep into the tension that would normally accompany deep-cover operations.  Instead, he plays up the silliness of Ed Begley.  He does that very well, but it's at odds with the tone of the rest of the film.  Billion Dollar Brain is simply an example of an under-directed film.

"Okay, Michael...your motivation is...um...it's cold.  Action!"

Is there anything as sad as a spy movie that doesn't have a coherent plot?  Well, yes, if you want to get all "big picture" on me, but in terms of spy movies, the answer is "no."  Harry Palmer doesn't know exactly what he's supposed to be doing for a decent portion of this film, which makes it awfully difficult for the audience to follow his logic.  Harry's working as a double agent for somebody who is double-crossing a madman, while there is another double-agent involved...and several supporting characters die for little or no reason.  I might accept the random plot holes and ridiculousness if the main character's charisma was enough to help this movie coast to the finish, but Harry Palmer is not very impressive in this film.  Aside from Caine's Cockney accent, Palmer doesn't have much personality.  While this may be the third movie in the series, the inherent coolness of Harry Palmer must be established early and often to forgive story weaknesses of this magnitude.  Billion Dollar Brain does not do that.

That is not to say that Billion Dollar Brain is worthless.  Even a script-hampered Michael Caine can be entertaining, and he goes through enough of the motions to make this film seem like more of an adventure than it really is.  In fact, the final third of the film almost serves as a template for the silliness that the Roger Moore Bonds would become infamous for.  This isn't a good spy movie, or even a good regular movie.  It is mildly entertaining, though, and probably better than the third installment of most film series. 

12 Angry Men

I missed out on a lot of common experiences in high school because my classes tended to have unusual curriculum.  I have never read The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Beowulf, or Heart of Darkness.  I know, I know, I'm a lucky fella.  I also was not required to see 12 Angry Men when I studied the Constitution or in a speech class (in the "group think" chapter).  Sure, I've heard about the movie from my peers, but I never felt compelled to watch it, even when I noticed that it was in IMDB's top ten rated movies of all time.  Sometimes, I don't know what my problem is.

12 Angry Men is not the follow-up movie adaptation to the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno television show, The Angriest Man.  Instead, it is a courtroom drama that actually doesn't take place in a courtroom at all.  As the movie poster suggests, it takes place in a dynamite factory.  The vast majority of the film (aside from a brief opening scene and a quick epilogue) takes place in the jury room.  The audience has not heard the lawyers speak, but the jury has heard the complete arguments of the prosecutors and the defense, and now it's time to decide whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty.  Of course, you need all twelve jurors to agree on the verdict, or else the jury is hung and the whole shebang is declared a mistrial.  That sounds pretty simple, but this is a capital crime, so a "guilty" verdict will result in the death penalty.  Despite the gravity of the case, the jury initially sits down and assumes that their deliberation will take all of five minutes; the case seems open-and-shut.  The first vote is 11-1, guilty, with only Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) dissenting.  And since the vote has to be unanimous, it is up to the rest of the jurors to convince (by whatever means) Juror 8 to change his vote...or, it is up to him to change everyone else's.

After I first watched this movie, I realized that there were some subtleties that I had missed the first time through; after my second viewing, I can definitely say that director Sidney Lumet did a great job.  Just the camerawork alone is fantastic.  You would think that a film set in one room would be visually dull and probably peppered with close-ups to vary the shots, but not this one.  The final shot of the film, a wide-angle crane shot of the jurors all leaving the courthouse, was what piqued my interest.  That shot felt so refreshing that I had to review the film and figure out why.  Here's what I noticed: the camera angles in the movie gradually shift their angle as the film progresses.  In the beginning, all the camera shots are a looking down slightly, or are at least at eye-level; by the end of the film, every shot is looking up at the actors.  So what?  Well, looking up at the actors (especially when they're arguing and are getting all sweaty) brings the ceiling into the shot, like the room is getting smaller (or the men are slowly swelling, I suppose).  It also felt like the room was getting smaller, too; I'm not sure if that was a camera trick, or maybe a larger table in the room, or maybe the set walls were pushed in a little, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just my imagination.  These subtle cinematographic techniques add layers to the film, making it work on a subconscious level as well as the obvious look-at-the-actors-level.

The fancy camera tactics wouldn't have helped if the cast was no good, but this film is stacked with noteworthy actors.  As the conscience of film, Henry Fonda is the main character, and he is as good as he usually is; Henry Fonda was one of the great do-gooders in film, with most of his characters (at least, in his most famous movies) being noble and brave.  You wouldn't think that a film that essentially boils down to fighting peer pressure (vote guilty, everybody's doing it) could have a brave character, but that's what Fonda brings to the table.  Lee J. Cobb, as Juror 3, played Fonda's nemesis, of sorts.  He was perfect as the brutish, bullying jerk, the perfect foil for Fonda's calm rationality.  The rest of the players (Martin Balsam, John "the voice of Piglet" Fiedler, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec, and Robert Webber) were good, although some were a little one-dimensional.  The standout were Ed Begley's performance as the bitter racist and John Fiedler, in his typical role as the timid guy in the room.

This film was made in 1957 and that age shows itself from time to time.  The fact that an "ethnic" defendant would have twelve middle-aged or older white men for his jury feels a little odd now.  And I realize that racism is still an issue in America, but the scene where everyone turns their back on Begley (while powerful) is a little more dramatic than realistic.  Still, this is a great movie that is still relevant.  The film takes a basic concept --- that of reasonable doubt --- and forms a subtle, intelligent movie around it.  The movie isn't even long, clocking in at just over ninety minutes, and it is packed full of interesting, varied performances.  This film's quality was not a foregone conclusion --- it was made on a shoestring budget and featured a first-time film director --- but it still managed to be nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, all for a picture set in one room, based on a legal issue.

Yeah...this is a good one.