The Kremlin Letter (1970) Every so often, in the midst of splashy fantasy spy movies dominated by the Bonds and their myriad imitators, a few daring filmmakers would attempt a more down 'n dirty, reality based espionage movie......
You know the kind......more John LeCarre than Ian Fleming. More depressing, more slowly paced......with a cast of seedy spies out to double, triple and quadruple-cross each other......
No hot babes, no casinos, no tuxedos, no cars with ejector seats. No fun.
Here's a prime example from Hollywood directing legend John Huston. It reminded us of the old vaudeville joke about spies.
A stealthy spy knocks on an apartment door to make contact with a fellow secret agent. When the door opens, the spy who knocked says, "The purple pelican flies over the polka dotted penguin".....
To which the guy answering the door replies with a laugh, "Oh sorry. I'm Goldfine the butcher. You want Goldfine the spy.....he's two flights up, Apt. 8-B."
The only other thing we ever remembered about "The Kremlin Letter" (and we're thinkin' it's the only thing anyone remembered) was the sight of the ever urbane George Sanders in full transvestite drag.......forever filed in the category of 'Things you can't un-see..."
We're back in the cold, cold war and everyone's after this film's McGuffin.....a letter written by some CIA spymaster to a Russian spymaster detailing a plan for the U.S. and Russia to collude in thwarting Red China's nuclear program.
Oops. Slightly embarrassing and maybe a World War 3 starter-upper. So an entire team of veteran spies fly off to the Soviet Union in hopes of buying back the letter or just swiping it.
They've all got silly code names like The Highwayman, The Whore, Sweet Alice, Erector Set, Warlock, Puppet Maker, The Dentist, yada, yada.......and none of them are to be trusted or trust each other as they proceed to......you guessed it......double, triple and quadruple-cross each other.
None of what transpires is ever made even a smidgen understandable to an audience, so we won't waste our time describing it......
Somewhere near the end of this film's interminable 2 hours, whole bunches of the spy crew start getting killed off.......not that you or anyone else will care. Or figure out why.
Huston assembled a cast to die for.....Max Von Sydow, Orson Welles, Richard Boone (the only one having fun with his role and acting like he still has a pulse), Dean Jagger, Nigel Greene and of course, the bewigged and gowned George Sanders.
They're all at the mercy of the impossibly tangled plot and Huston's direction of them lacks any style, substance or meaning.
We'll say no more other than "The Kremlin Letter"s a 1 star (*) waste of time. Maybe if at least one of them had gotten to escape Russia using a jet-pack, we would've woke up......
And consumer alert:....all that crapola the film promises you in the first five minutes, the suicide, the two executions, the seduction, the key to the plot......never happens. Our theory: the 20th Century Fox advertising guy who created that tagline was a double agent working for MGM......
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