because part of me wants desperately to think of John Huston's The Kremlin Letter as something like brilliant.
The other part of me suffered through a long, overly-complicated, and tedious chunk of Le Carre-ish dullness that made two hours seem like twenty.
I'd like to put the argument to rest.
What I did take away from TKL is that spying is beyond nasty, it's downright loathsome. Just imagine hooded American agents forcing a Russian intelligence officer to watch films of his 18 year old daughter being made love to by an older black woman.
No insult here to 18 year olds, black women, or lesbians, but to seduce a young woman in order to blackmail her Soviet father--who probably thinks of black people in general as a couple rungs down the evolutionary ladder and lesbians as degenerates--is pretty darned ruthless. Throw in Max Von Sydow and Orson Welles treating enemies of the state as so much clay to be manipulated, then destroyed, Richard Boone as a heartless killer with a warm-hearted chuckle, Barbara Parkins and Bibi Andersson as hopelessly damaged women in the crossfire, and about another dozen pimps and whores and elegant homosexuals and hashish-smokers and you'll long for the happier days of the couple handcuffed together in The 39 Steps.
There's a startling viciousness to The Kremlin Letter, and it isn't in the form of occasionally seeing a character beaten, sometimes to death, with the sides of hands. It's how sociopathic people become when they commit espionage. I left the movie feeling vaguely nauseated. The aforementioned blackmail, the tying off of a loose end with one character tearing open the clothing of a women, not to rape her but to terrorize her before he smashes her kidneys and crushes her windpipe, the look on Patrick O'Neal's face as he reads a note from a Soviet agent at the end of the movie--kill the seduced 18 year old, her mother, and so on and so forth, or I'll kill somebody you care about.
It's no wonder spies get shot.
The other part of me suffered through a long, overly-complicated, and tedious chunk of Le Carre-ish dullness that made two hours seem like twenty.
I'd like to put the argument to rest.
What I did take away from TKL is that spying is beyond nasty, it's downright loathsome. Just imagine hooded American agents forcing a Russian intelligence officer to watch films of his 18 year old daughter being made love to by an older black woman.
No insult here to 18 year olds, black women, or lesbians, but to seduce a young woman in order to blackmail her Soviet father--who probably thinks of black people in general as a couple rungs down the evolutionary ladder and lesbians as degenerates--is pretty darned ruthless. Throw in Max Von Sydow and Orson Welles treating enemies of the state as so much clay to be manipulated, then destroyed, Richard Boone as a heartless killer with a warm-hearted chuckle, Barbara Parkins and Bibi Andersson as hopelessly damaged women in the crossfire, and about another dozen pimps and whores and elegant homosexuals and hashish-smokers and you'll long for the happier days of the couple handcuffed together in The 39 Steps.
There's a startling viciousness to The Kremlin Letter, and it isn't in the form of occasionally seeing a character beaten, sometimes to death, with the sides of hands. It's how sociopathic people become when they commit espionage. I left the movie feeling vaguely nauseated. The aforementioned blackmail, the tying off of a loose end with one character tearing open the clothing of a women, not to rape her but to terrorize her before he smashes her kidneys and crushes her windpipe, the look on Patrick O'Neal's face as he reads a note from a Soviet agent at the end of the movie--kill the seduced 18 year old, her mother, and so on and so forth, or I'll kill somebody you care about.
It's no wonder spies get shot.