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The Kremlin Letter [1970] John Huston
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The Kremlin Letter (1970) 
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065950/

The Kremlin Letter is an American noir film directed by John Huston, starring Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Patrick ONeal and George Sanders. It was released in February 1970 by 20th Century-Fox. The screenplay was co-written by Huston and Gladys Hill as a faithful adaptation of the novel by Noel Behn, who had worked for the United States Armys Counterintelligence Corps. Said by reviewers to be beautifully and engagingly photographed, the film is a highly complex and realistic tale of bitter intrigue and espionage set in the winter of 1969-1970 at the height of the US-Soviet Cold War. The Kremlin Letter was a commercial failure and thinly reviewed in 1970, but the film has gathered steady praise from some critics throughout the decades since its release. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville called The Kremlin Letter masterly and ...saw it as establishing the standard for cinema.

 Bibi Andersson ...  Erika Kosnov 
 Richard Boone ...  Ward 
 Nigel Green ...  The Whore 
 Dean Jagger ...  Highwayman 
 Lila Kedrova ...  Madam Sophie 
 Micheál MacLiammóir ...  Sweet Alice 
 Patrick ONeal ...  Charles Rone 
 Barbara Parkins ...  B.A. 
 Ronald Radd ...  Captain Potkin 
 George Sanders ...  Warlock 
 Raf Vallone ...  Puppet Maker 
 Max von Sydow ...  Colonel Kosnov 
 Orson Welles ...  Bresnavitch 
 Sandor Elès ...  Lt. Grodin (as Sandor Eles) 
 Niall MacGinnis ...  Erector Set 


The film shows its characters speaking Russian without the use of English subtitles by beginning such scenes in Russian and then segueing into English. Many of the scenes set in Moscow were filmed during 1969 in the Finnish capital city of Helsinki which features neoclassical buildings similar to those in Leningrad. There was also filming at locations in New York City (the Hispanic Society of America, Central Park Zoo and Greenwich Village), Italy and Mexico. Mostly aerial stock footage from the summer of 1969 showing Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York is also seen in the film.

With the turn of the ‘70s, storied filmmaker John Huston was sorely in need of a hit when he signed on for the screen adaptation of Noel Behn’s Cold War espionage potboiler The Kremlin Letter (1970). Suffice to say that the box-office returns were not what either director or studio had hoped; still, the finished project is an entry in Huston’s oeuvre still worth investigating, for its echoes of such front-line offerings as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the satiric audaciousness that Huston brought to the proceedings.

Huston’s black bird here is the titular missive, an unauthorized written promise made by a U.S. diplomat promising the U.S.S.R. America’s alliance should the Soviets ever decide to attack Red China. Uncle Sam, understandably, wants this document back, and a high-ranking intelligence chieftain referred to only as “the Highwayman” (Dean Jagger) selects his point man for the mission, retired naval officer Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal).

Along with his briefing, Rone receives the identities of the genuinely mixed bag of operatives who’ll be at his disposal, including B.A. (Barbara Parkins), the gorgeous lockpick who inherited her notorious safecracker father’s skills and then some; “the Whore” (Nigel Green), a small-time pimp from a Mexican brothel; Ward (Richard Boone), the matter-of-fact veteran spy who’s the Highwayman’s trusted second; and “the Warlock” (George Sanders), an aging San Francisco transvestite possessed of entrée into Moscow society.

After blackmailing a Soviet spy (Ronald Radd) to gain access to his Moscow apartment for a base of operations, the cadre sets out to bug the office of Vladimir Kosnov (Max von Sydow), the chief of the secret police. It isn’t long before the spies find themselves caught in a power struggle between Kosnov and politician Aleksei Bresnavitch (Orson Welles), and in working their way out, encounter a string of double-crosses as well as the stunning truth underlying their mission.

In his memoir An Open Book, Huston remembered his disappointment with the popular reception that met The Kremlin Letter. “The book [had] been a best seller. It had, moreover, all those qualities that were just coming into fashion in 1970 — violence, lurid sex, drugs...Gladys Hill and I wrote the script, which I considered quite good, though in retrospect it was perhaps overcomplicated.”

Perhaps overcomplicated, and perhaps too over the top too often; New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote at the time of the film’s opening that “as with so many recent Huston films, the scale of everything — geography, sets, absurdities, misanthropies, running time — has been enlarged as if to disguise what looks to be the director’s awful boredom with movies.” 

More charitable was Sight and Sound, which declared that “Even if we forget the meaning and concentrate on the fun — as Huston himself has done for long stretches — the eventful trip through Hustonland should leave us with little cause for complaint.” Huston felt “the performances couldn’t have been bettered. It was extremely well photographed [by Ted Scaife]—there was a virtuosity, a shine to it...I wished I could have given my friends [producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown] if not blockbusters, at least successful films. I still feel bad about it.”

Vincent Canby of the New York Times called the movie depressing. Variety had already noted in a pre-release review that The Kremlin Letter ...makes for valuable viewing, but with the piecing together another thing. Thus is this nastiness of the spy business graphically described. It is an engagingly photographed piece of business. A much later TV Guide review said the film was Beautifully photographed... a hopelessly convoluted spy drama with so many intricate interweavings that you truly need a scorecard to keep track of the plotters. Craig Butler of Allmovie wrote, Although it has its partisans, most consider The Kremlin Letter to be a big disappointment... the plot of the novel upon which it is based is simply too dense to be translated to the screen in a film of normal length. Butler went on to note that Richard Boone really shines, turning in a very fine performance that leaves the rest of the actors in the dust... there are those who will greatly enjoy Kremlin for its twisted plotting and cynicism...

There has always been a strong undercurrent of significant praise for the film. In 2005, UCLA scholar Bob Hudson noted in the journal Lingua Romana that French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville ...used the term magisterial in praise of John Hustons The Kremlin Letter (1970), which he had just viewed the night before the interview. Despite the commercial failure of the film, Melville saw it as establishing the standard for cinema, and explained his quest as an attempt to achieve such grandeur. The Time Out Film Guide calls The Kremlin Letter powerful... possibly the clearest statement of Hustons vision of a cruel and senseless world in operation.



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