Brainstorm (William Conrad, 1965)

Cast: Jeffrey Hunter, Anne Francis, Dana Andrews, Viveca Lindfors, Stacy Harris, Kathie Browne, Philip Pine, Michael Pate, Robert McQueeney, Strother Martin. Screenplay: Mann Rubin, Lawrence B. Marcus. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Robert Emmet Smith. Film editing: William H. Ziegler. Music: George Duning.

The vertiginous Brainstorm starts off in one direction, with the sadistic industrialist Cort Benson (Dana Andrews) gaslighting his employee, Jim Grayam (Jeffrey Hunter), who is having an affair with Benson's wife, Lorrie (Anne Francis). But then it turns in another direction: Benson may be trying to make Grayam think he's going mad, but Grayam may actually be insane. He plots an intricate scheme to kill Benson and get away with it, and he almost does. It's a whipsaw premise for a thriller that in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock might have been a classic. Unfortunately, William Conrad was a better character actor than director, and he doesn't quite bring it off. Part of the problem is that Hunter is a little too handsome for the role and doesn't balance the attractiveness of Grayam with enough darkness: We ought to feel more ambivalent about the character from the start. The script has some distracting inconsistencies of plot and character that a more sure-footed director might have overcome, the way Hitchcock covers up the plot holes in Vertigo (1958). There are still some good performances, especially from Viveca Lindfors as a psychiatrist who plays her own ambivalent role in Grayam's case. I think it's the off-balance narrative that has allowed Brainstorm to develop into something of a cult film after its initial rejection from the critics. 

Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983)

Christopher Walken in Brainstorm

Cast: Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson, Jordan Christopher, Donald Hotton, Alan Fudge, Joe Dorsey, Bill Morey, Jason Lively, Georgianne Walken. Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin, Robert Stitzel, Philip Frank Messina. Cinematography: Richard Yuricich. Production design: John Vallone. Film editing: Freeman A. Davies, Edward Warschilka. Music: James Horner. 

Brainstorm is a sci-tech thriller based on a premise familiar to the genre: Brilliant scientists come up with a breakthrough and face the threat that it will be misused by nefarious forces. In older films, the nefarious forces tended to be foreign ones, Nazis or Commies. Today, however, they usually come from our own corporate-military-industrial complex. Working together, Dr. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) have created a way to transmit the brainwaves of one person to another, stimulating not only the visual and audible sensations but also the bodily ones -- respiratory, muscular, etc. The transmissions can also be recorded and stored. It's virtual reality gone whole hog, especially after Brace's wife, Karen (Natalie Wood), an industrial designer, comes up with a snazzy little headset. Brace and Reynolds are hopeful for all sorts of peaceful uses of the technology, but to get funding for it, they have to agree with the head of the corporation for which they work, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson), that it can be shown to investors. And you know who has the money to fund such a project. The inventors are dismayed at the prospect of misuse, but they put up with it until the real dangers of the invention show up. A researcher records himself having an orgasm and gives it to another man who plays it on a loop, sending himself into a coma from the experience. And then Reynolds herself, a chain smoker, has a heart attack and dies, but not before hauling herself to the device and recording the experience. Brace discovers the tape and almost dies playing it before he's able to disconnect. Finding that the company has kept the tape and has actually killed someone with it and is experimenting with other malign uses for the technology, Brace and Karen team up to find ways to stop it. It's a worthy premise, but Trumbull, a noted special effects director making his first (and only) feature in the director's chair, encountered a perfect storm of difficulties, the chief of which was Natalie Wood's death in 1981. Wood's major scenes in Brainstorm had already been filmed, but MGM, which was in financial difficulties, pulled the plug on the project. Fortunately, the production was insured by Lloyd's of London, which stepped in and allowed Trumbull to complete the movie. Wood's sister, Lana, doubled for her in the remaining scenes. Still, Brainstorm was not a critical or commercial success. There's a funny sequence in which Brace causes the robots on the assembly line to go haywire, and Fletcher's performance is great. Wood is fine, but Walken, a specialist in offbeat characters, seems miscast. The subplot, which involves the Braces using the technology to communicate their feelings to each other and repair their fraying marriage, is tedious and sentimental. And the concluding sequence, in which we find out what Reynolds saw when she was dying, is almost inevitably a letdown.