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, and it is full of skewed angles, abrasive cutting and grotesque humour. And although the story is less convoluted than I was expecting, his habit of jumping into scenes, often making them feel like non sequiturs, almost made me as paranoid as Palmer himself.

Although Billion Dollar Brain lacks the cool precision to entirely work as a Harry Palmer movie, I found it compulsively watchable, not least because of its surprisingly topical anxiety that the world might end because a very rich man says so.