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Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 5:21 pm
by Ste
Coming to DVD on November 7th. I've never seen this one, so I'm quite intrigued.
Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 2:00 am
by Glenn Anders
THE KREMLIN LETTER always seemed to me an underrated film. The ending was said to be preposterous, but really, knowing what we do now about Cold War machinations, the whole thing seems to be within the realm of possibility. I once fell in with a group of "International Couriers," very popular in the 1980's. The leader, who spent some time with me (wanted to recruit me!), thought both the novel and the film among his favorites. He liked the novel a tad better because he could savor the details, but he thought the film one of the best spy pictures ever made.
He said that the plot, as he knew something about the life, was drawn from reality, including -- in an exaggerated sense -- the ending!
Welles has a supporting but important part.
Glenn
Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 2:27 pm
by marcoshark
Glenn,
Wow! thanks for sharing that little bit about your past. Ste, thanks for the heads up. That evil Amazon now has more of my hard earned money!
I think I brought up this movie here some time in the past. For some reason, to me at least there were echos of the truth in it. I figured that the truth was somewhere between this and say one of Ross Thomas' novels of just how real the sky game is.
The Kremlin Letter (1970)
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 7:32 pm
by 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.
Re: The Kremlin Letter (1970)
Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 3:22 am
by 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
Re: The Kremlin Letter (1970)
Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2024 4:54 pm
by Wellesnet