Billion Dollar Brain is a 1967 British espionage film directed by Ken Russell and based on the novel Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton. The film features Michael Caine as secret agent Harry Palmer, the anti-hero protagonist of the film versions of The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin . The "brain" of the title is a sophisticated computer with which an ultra-right-wing organization controls its worldwide anti-Soviet spy network. Billion Dollar Brain is the third of the Harry Palmer film series, preceded by The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin . It is the only film in which Ken Russell... worked as a mainstream 'director-for-hire', and the last film to feature actress Françoise Dorléac. A fourth film in the series, an adaptation of Horse Under Water, was tentatively planned but never made. However, Caine played Palmer in two later films, Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg. Harry Palmer , who has left MI-5 to work as a private investigator, is told by a mechanical voice on the phone to take a package to Helsinki.
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