Trivia / Billion Dollar Brain

• All-Star Cast: Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Ed Begley Sr. and Oskar Homolka. The first three at the time had either won or would go on to win Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor,^note Caine for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules, Malden for A Streetcar Named Desire, and Begley Sr. for Sweet Bird of Youth. Caine was also nominated four times for Best Actor. while Homolka didn't win, but was nominated for I Remember Mama.
• B-Team Sequel: Otto Heller, who was the cinematographer for the first two Harry Palmer movies, was supposed to return, but would not submit to a medical examination (for insurance purposes), so the production could not hire him.
• California Doubling: Finland doubles for Soviet Latvia.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The first and only time Ken Russell was a director for hire, made before his characteristically graphic and surreal films. He only did so because of a contractual obligation and disliked the experience enough that it led to him producing his own films in the future. When he wrote a book about the making-of, the producer tried to have a judge block its release.
    I was working with people I did not know. I was not enjoying them. One felt all the time they were working for the producer against me... It was a pity. But only because of the time wasted. You lose a year of your life when you could have been doing something better.
  • Michael Caine thought the visuals were "stunning" but felt "Ken Russell lost the story somewhere and no one could care a damn about what was going on because they couldn't follow what was going on."
• Deleted Scene: The 2004 DVD release cut a scene between Harry and Basil, because it featured The Beatles song "A Hard Day's Night", which would've been too expensive too re-license.
• Fake Russian: Austrian actor Oskar Homolka reprises his role as KGB Colonel Stok, along with plenty of Fake Latvians.
• Franchise Killer: A fourth film in the series, an adaptation of Horse Under Water, was tentatively planned but cancelled after this one bombed.
• Life Imitates Art: Some of the film's more outlandish plot points are eerily prescient to Real Life events from years later:
  • The titular "billion dollar brain" presupposes the heavy reliance on computers for intelligence-gathering and military purposes. Nowadays, such tools are the norm, with human intelligence assets becoming increasingly rare.
  • Midwinter's attempted coup of a Communist nation, itself an idea with plenty of real-world precedent, felled by his allies conning him out of his money and general incompetence, mirrors the failed 2020 coup attempt in Venezuela. Also counts as Hilarious in Hindsight.
• No Stunt Double: Michael Caine performed most of his own stunts. During the final ice floe scene, he almost slipped and fell into freezing water.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: Ken Russell agreed to direct the film in exchange for United Artists making one of his art films. The result of this deal was eventually Women in Love.
• The Other Darrin: In the European French dub, Michel Roux (who alread replaced Dominique Paturel in Funeral in Berlin) was replaced by Jean-Claude Michel as Harry Palmer.
• Posthumous Credit: Françoise Dorléac (Anya) died in a car accident four months before the release of this movie.
• Real-Life Relative: Michael Caine's brother Stanley made his film debut as a postman in the opening sequence.
• Reality Subtext:
  • The plot, about a villain using advanced technology to conduct spywork and sabotage with human agents like Palmer merely as pawns, mirrors the (at the time) gradual phasing out of human intelligence for signals intelligence, with Palmer representing the "old way" of doing things and the titular "Brain" representing the wave of the future.
  • General Midwinter's plan to destroy Communism by overthrowing the governments of smaller satellite states one at a time reflects U.S. foreign policy about "Domino theory" that led to proxy conflicts like The Vietnam War, as well as more covert attempts at overthrowing leftist or leftist-sympathetic governments. The fact that Midwinter is a private businessman also has a very long precedent.

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