Honorable Mention
This British film sometimes gets listed as a science fiction film, and I suppose you could compare it to many of the techno thrillers which would become common within a decade or so, where a piece of new technology — or an exaggerated new technology — would be the heart of a much larger story.
But the reason for this identification is actually fairly obvious within the first few minutes of the film: After all, it starts with the theme music from the third and final BBC Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, an ominous march with rather dark and serious undertones.
We then see on the screen a complex machine, which starts up, unscrolling an endless sheet of paper. And then a series of pantograph arms start moving, tracing a series of jagged lines on the paper as it rolls past.
The theme music marches on as a prison van races through the streets. We see a man in handcuffs inside for a moment and then the van turns off into a large and impressive stone building.
Then, as it enters the gate, we finally get a glimpse of the sign next to it, which tells us that this is a psychiatric hospital.
It’s a remarkably strong opening, one which is deliberately “coded” as a dark, science fiction-based horror film of the Quatermass variety.
It doesn’t lose that image right away: we get a few minutes of the head of the institute, Dr. Geoffrey Allen, (Patrick Barr) and his top assistant, Dr. Philippa Roberts (Elizabeth Allan)
who just happens to be his wife, talking about their domestic problems before a couple of guards escort in the prisoner and hook him up to the machine we saw in the credits.
This is, in fact, an electroencephalograph, a machine which measures brain waves and Dr. Roberts questions the patient while watching his responses. Supposedly, these are the responses of a psychotic, which isn’t much of a surprise as he has murdered several people.
It seems like the story is going to continue along this path, but that’s when it all changes abruptly. Philippa decides to move out and take a job in another hospital, and while she is there, she performs the same test on an amnesiac patient, Frank Smith.
Unfortunately, the truth serum she uses to break down the inhibitions which are blocking his memories works far too well, and he realizes that he probably told her far too much. He’s a small-time criminal and got hurt while working on his latest score and he can’t risk her telling anyone else what she knows.
He drags her away and locks her up.
Her husband still loves her and starts his own amateur investigation, trying to track down the patient, a search which becomes far more urgent when he discovers that the man has a serious brain injury and will die if he doesn’t get an operation in time.
And that then becomes the main plot for the remainder of the film. The brain machine hardly gets mentioned again.
Instead, it turns into a familiar sort of British thriller of the era, with a race against the clock; another thread involving a prescription drug robbery and the criminals who are also after Frank Smith for their own reasons; and several more murders.
Two rather curious things do stand out about the film: the first is that Elizabeth Allan keeps mispronouncing the word “electroencephalograph,” pronouncing the “c” with a hard sound, “electroenKephalograph”, instead of the correct soft, “s”-like sound, like “enSephalograph.”
This is particularly embarrassing when you remember not only that she’s not supposed to be a foreigner with an accent, but she is meant to be a medical specialist, working in the neurological field.
I’ll admit the second came as a pleasant minor surprise, as our two estranged lovers are much older than one would expect: Barr was 47 years old — although he looks older — while Elizabeth Allan was only two years younger (and looks perhaps a few years younger than she was). We’re so used to seeing twenty-somethings in these sorts of films that it comes a mild shock to see the romantic leads in a film who are about the right age for their professional accomplishments.
It’s far too rare but still welcome.
The Brain Machine isn’t a bad little thriller. It’s quite entertaining in a mild sort of way.
But it isn’t the film the credits promised.
It’s not the easiest film to find, and, if you are looking for something more science fictional and Quatermass inspired, you will not be happy with it.
But if all you want is a cheerful and familiar sort of Fifties British thriller, then you can’t go too far wrong…
rivets on the poster 
I’m sure I’ve heard the likes of ‘electroencephalograph’ pronounced with a hard ‘c’ in old-school, RP English; I’d assume that that was once thought correct because it corresponded to the Greek ‘c’.
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