Word: palmer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Action Platoons and overrun two of their outposts so far this year. Though they have won no major victories, the Communists have made a sizable show of force and demonstrated their ability to fight hard, if they choose to, in nearly every province in Viet Nam. Lieut. General Bruce Palmer, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Army in Viet Nam, calls the pressure "heavy and sustained" in I Corps, in the area around Saigon, in the Chu Lai area and around Bong Son on the coastal plains-and "sporadic" all over the rest of the country...
...Harry Palmer, the bland antiheroic secret agent of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, the chap who hates his job and doesn't care what kind of dry vermouth they put in his martinis, is back with his spectacles and his non-U English accent in Billion Dollar Brain. So is Michael Caine to play him in yet another thriller by Novelist Len Deighton. But in this third outing the law of diminishing returns has begun catching up with the team...
...Palmer has finally got away from Colonel Ross, his deadpan boss in M.I.5, and is now operating a seedy, one-man detective agency on his own. Suddenly a mysterious envelope arrives with ? 200 and a locker key, followed by a phone call from a stentorian computer instructing him to deliver the parcel that he will find in a London airport locker to a Dr. Kaarna in Helsinki. The package, Palmer soon discovers, contains deadly, virus-infected eggs...
...Helsinki, Palmer and the eggs get themselves scrambled with a beautiful blonde spy (the late Françoise Dorléac) who is cooling it in red fox, and a jolly American spy (Karl Malden), who is sweating it in a sauna bath. Both of them are working for General Midwinter, a mad Texas multimillionaire (Ed Begley), who is operating a private CIA against Russia, coordinated by a giant walk-in computer complex-the billion-dollar brain...
...will start on a medium shot if Michael Caine, swing up to a sign on a building, down to people leaving the building, and back to Michael Caine--all so quickly we might have seen four separate shots. The interior-exterior point-of-view cutting in the scene where Palmer discovers the dead Doctor Kaarna reveals Russell's sophistication concerning standard devices, as does his tendency to cut to paintings and other background objects prior to introducing characters into the frame. The cross-cutting between a Moscow-bound train and Plamer's Pursuing car is riveting, and Russell shows sensitivity...