The Kremlin Letter on TCM!

[mido505]

THE KREMLIN LETTER, directed by John Huston, and starring Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow (Ingmar Bergman and Ming the Merciless!!), Micheal MacLiammoir (as Sweet Alice!!??), George Sanders (in drag!!), Bibi Andersson (Bergman again!!), Nigel Green (Nayland Smith!!), and other greats too numerous to mention, will be showing this evening at 12:15 on TCM! I've been waiting to catch this legendary Huston/Welles title for quite some time, so I can't wait...and hope I won't be disappointed.

[Glenn Anders]

In fact, Peter, almost everyone in THE KREMLIN LETTER's incredible cast has "a blink" or a cameo (including John Huston as an Admiral of Naval Intelligence and Marc Lawrence as a priest!), but Welles' part is a key one. The film, as a result, is bursting with outrageous, seemingly absurd ideas for its time, some of them perhaps not fully enough developed.

I once had a neighbor, the leader of a group of "couriers" [read, CIA contract agents], who told me that Noel Behn's novel had the World of Cold War Espionage pretty well down, and that John Huston's film adaptation was as about as close to the truth as Hollywood would be allowed to come. [After seeing the film, I was not reassured about our future!]

In those days, the idea that a Director of CIA Counter Espionage could be cynically in cahoots with his Soviet opposite number seemed sheer fantasy. Yet today, we know that Counter Intelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton was convinced during the latter part of his career that someone in his highest echelon was in exactly that position!

Huston and Welles, who were onto American hypocrisy long before most of us, must have sadly relished their task of bringing this surreal spy story to the screen.

Unfortunately, as today, very few Americans in1970 realized what was being done to them, or what was being done to others in our name.

"All those little dots down there."

Glenn