The Kremlin Letter (1970)

The Kremlin Letter is an American spy film directed by John Huston, starring Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Patrick O'Neal 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 Army's 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.

Synopsis

Late in 1969, a brilliant young United States Navy intelligence officer named Charles Rone (Patrick O'Neal) finds his commission revoked so that he can be recruited into an espionage mission. Rone is told that the mission is being undertaken independently of governmental intelligence agencies, as was commonplace prior to World War II, when espionage operations were handled by a small community of agents operating on a freelance basis.

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