MovieChat Forums > Billion Dollar Brain (1968) Discussion > seeing it again,crazy film,looks great b...

seeing it again,crazy film,looks great but very over the top. SPOILERS

posted 10 years ago by ib011f9545i
4 replies | jump to latest

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Of course I have seen this film lots of times on tv and dvd but saw it on the big screen today and it of course has greater impact there.

It looks great,Finland looks wonderful and the sound track is haunting but what about the script and acting?

I saw the film at the EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL,as part of a tribute to the screenwriter JOHN McGRATH.
The festival director said it was an odd film,no debate required on that,CAINE knew Mcgrath from early BBC plays he had been in and got him involved in the screenplay.
Mcgrath was a far left guy and so the script is interesting if you know your Soviet/marxist history.
The script takes a view that could have come from the BROWN BOOK OF NAZI WAR CRIMINALS which used to be pushed out by the SOVIET BLOC nations.
Anybody fighting for freedom in the soviet empire was probably an ex pro nazi war criminal and the USSR had liberated eastern europe from people like that.

Well there were a lot of dodgy people who were anti communist/anti Russian but the USSR was not the land of the free as it showed to the world the year after this film was made in Czechoslovakia.

But this is of course not a serious film but it does have some strong scenes,endlessly repeated shots of people drowning and at one point Caine wakes up in a bath full of dead Latvian nationalists.

Seeing it on the big screen I saw at once that the scene with the rows and rows of steel helmeted anti communist troops is meant to echo photos of nazi stormtroopers at Nuremburg.

But if you are going to watch this it is best to try to keep it apart from the first 2 HARRY PALMER films which are serious spy films where this is almost satire of spy films.

The acting is odd,the film festival director who introduced the film said CAINE was fed up with the character by the time the film was made and I think it shows in his performance,he looks weird,and is not on screen as much as you might expect since he is the star.
FRANCOISE DORLEC looks great but she speaks like she is reading cards held up for her to read,perhaps her English was not very good.

You can spot SUSAN GEORGE and DONALD SUTHERLAND in small parts

[–] franzkabuki 10 years ago

Well it's quite restrained and ordinary next to Russell's other films. I like it a lot for its aesthetic qualities and an unusual story, but that doesn't change the fact it's blatantly offensive to Latvians as well as other nations occupied and oppressed by the USSR; criticism of American jingoism is one thing, but here the circumstance in which it's placed, is wildly inappropriate... and the jingoists in question actually end up being the good guys, attempting to liberate Latvia.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] ib011f9545i 10 years ago

It is a while since I read the book so I can't recall how much of the ANTI SOVIET LATVIANS ARE ALL NAZIS stuff is in the book but I reckon that most of it is not there.

The writer was a far left person,he has obviously believed all the then current soviet propaganda that the opposition in the occupied countries were all ex nazis.
But I think a lot of them had sided with nazi Germany to fight communist Russia and after the war they did not like to be associated with their former allies?

From the point of view of the nationalists I think they felt that they had to join in with somebody and had to put to one side any bad feelings they had towards the nazis.

There is a book called THE PATRIOTIC TRAITORS which covers all this stuff,I have it somewhere but have never actually read it.

As for the Americans,they had to work with the people who were anti Soviet,even if they were fascists,which a lot of them were?

[–] franzkabuki 9 years ago

"But I think a lot of them had sided with Nazi Germany to fight communist Russia and after the war they did not like to be associated with their former allies".

Not necessarily. But first of all - the Baltic states were no "allies", but rather countries occupied first by Soviets, then by Nazis. And secondly, you have to remember that most Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians who fought in the German army had no say on the matter as they were conscripted with the alternative to fighting against Soviets being a bullet to the back of the head (same applies to the folk who were conscripted to Red Army, of course, before they were kicked out of the Baltic states in 1941). And it's hard to blame even the small minority that joined the Nazi army voluntarily as it was largely a matter of payback for the Soviet occupation and annexation in 1940 - with all the subsequent mass murders and deportations. Nobody accuses the Finns of being "fascists" because they allied - and they indeed were a sovereign country - with Germany during WW2 in an effort to regain the territories lost to Soviets in the Winter War and neither should be the Baltic nations (and, for instance, at the Nurenberg trials, the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the 1st Estonian), was clearly declared a non-criminal unit within a criminal organisation; as a matter of fact, some former conscripts of the Estonian SS division served as guards at Nurenberg). Certainly, there were 'some' true "ideologicals" - and war criminals - amongst these nations, but the same goes for pretty much all German-occupied territories.

"They felt that they had to join in with somebody".

Not really; the vast majority would have gladly sat this one out as we had no fish to fry in that slaughter between the two terror regimes - nothing to gain whatsoever. After the first days of German occupation, it was clear that it was merely a matter of one bandit having "rescued" us from another.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] Jones70 (6195) 2 years ago

I enjoyed it a lot too.