The Harry Palmer series ended with this hallucinatory, dreamlike final episode. Harry Palmer, having retired from the espionage game, and trying to make a living as a private eye, is blackmailed back into the fold by his wily former boss, Colonel Ross. A crazy Texan billionaire is out to create chaos in Eastern Europe by unleashing a deadly virus contained in a pack of eggs and it is up to Superspy Harry Palmer to stop him before it's too late...

In many ways, "Billion Dollar Brain" is a hard film to rate. On the hand, it is virtually incomprehensible. Anyone hoping for a good, carefully plotted, gritty spy thriller (like "The Ipcress File") wlll be severely disappointed. On the other hand, if taken as a spectacle alone, "Billion Dollar Brain" is often astonishing. As befits an early feature from Ken Russell, the film is full of wonderful pictorial flourishes, complemented by the atmospheric, snowy Scandanavian locations. Some images linger long in the mind afterwards - an army… more »

The Harry Palmer series ended with this hallucinatory, dreamlike final episode. Harry Palmer, having retired from the espionage game, and trying to make a living as a private eye, is blackmailed back into the fold by his wily former boss, Colonel Ross. A crazy Texan billionaire is out to create chaos in Eastern Europe by unleashing a deadly virus contained in a pack of eggs and it is up to Superspy Harry Palmer to stop him before it's too late...

In many ways, "Billion Dollar Brain" is a hard film to rate. On the hand, it is virtually incomprehensible. Anyone hoping for a good, carefully plotted, gritty spy thriller (like "The Ipcress File") wlll be severely disappointed. On the other hand, if taken as a spectacle alone, "Billion Dollar Brain" is often astonishing. As befits an early feature from Ken Russell, the film is full of wonderful pictorial flourishes, complemented by the atmospheric, snowy Scandanavian locations. Some images linger long in the mind afterwards - an army of soldiers on horseback, materialising out of the mist; a naked corpse, frozen in a chair - but the visual extravangace tends to smother the story, which quickly gets lost. It is obvious that Ken Russell had no interest in the story at all (or probably the spy genre altogether) and was more interested in the visual possibilities of the material presented to him.

Some critics have named this as the best of the Palmer films and, while, yes, it is certainly the most gloriously cinematic of the three, it does not really work as a thriller.