I sat in on a Newsnight interview with Michael Caine the other day, as he was doing a show at the concert venue where I work.

One of the fascinating things he talked about - which didn't make the edit - was this ludicrous idea that he just plays himself on screen. Rather, he said, he's a bit like Fred Astaire: "You see Gene Kelly running up the walls and you say, 'I couldn't do that', but then you watch Fred Astaire, and he makes it look so easy - and you think, 'I could do that'. Trust me, you couldn't. And that's the same with my acting. 'I could do that.' Trust me, you couldn't."

That's true of his…

Twenty years ago today, on 22nd December 1999, BBC1 broadcast this film (well, technically you could say that it was actually twenty years ago tomorrow, cos it was on at half past midnight) and I instantly fell in love with it. I was twenty then, I am forty now and I don't care what you say, I still love this movie and I always will love it. It's so incredibly, enjoyably 1960s. It's the Blow-Up of spy movies and I kind of want to live in this film.

Back in '99 I was already a huge fan of Michael Caine and his spy character Harry Palmer, thanks to The Ipcress File and the first sequel, Funeral in Berlin. But it…

With intelligent computers looming ominously, private armies mobilising and ideological madness running wild, Billion Dollar Brain isn’t an easy watch in the current political climate. It nominally belongs to the same gritty, anti-Bond tradition as the previous Harry Palmer films, The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, but it is actually something far stranger—not that I’d expect anything less from the madman Ken Russell. It is espionage as impending nervous breakdown.

I still love Michael Caine’s weary, sardonic portrayal of Palmer, particularly how stubbornly unimpressed he is by power and authority. But as much as I enjoyed the Cold War paranoia and tech fetishism, Russell is not a natural fit for this kind of film. He could never resist excess,…

Billion Dollar Brain doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

A mostly disappointing end to the original Harry Palmer trilogy that's far too over-the-top and self-consciously "wacky" to make a decent follow-up to Funeral in Berlin, or The Ipcress File, but also lacking in sufficient quantities of Ken Russell's patented pixie dust of delirious perversion and frantically melodramatic scenery-chewing to earn a place among his more outré offerings. The result is an uneven and poorly-paced series of set pieces that lurch between these opposite extremes without any apparent rhyme or reason, resulting in an unsatisfying mixture of downbeat, sardonic humor that's reminiscent of the first two films, and an attempt at Dr. Strangeloveian satire that fosters…

“Some games are more dangerous than others.”

It was yet another hot day in Georgia, so the dogs wanted to watch something with snow in it. Billion Dollar Brain has lots of snow and ice but not much coherence. I found it disappointing on two previous viewings but didn’t remember its being this boring. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on and even harder to care.

After treading very cold water for an hour, we finally learn that the plot centers around the efforts of right-wing nutter Midwinter (Ed Begley) to create chaos in the Soviet Union. Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is caught in the middle between the good guys and bad guys, who seem to change sides constantly.…