DVD: The Kremlin Letter

John Huston’s 1970 spy movie is the sort of baggy, eccentric work that is routinely dismissed by critics at the time, but whose untidy pleasures become apparent with age. Max von Sydow and Orson Welles are among the cheap but arresting all-star cast in what begins as a colourful and camp 1960s caper, only to darken shockingly. It’s the DVD debut of as bleak a film as Huston made.

The Kremlin letter itself is, like the Maltese Falcon in the film which made the director’s name almost 30 years before, a device to set base and interesting human desires in motion: a rash US diplomatic note promising to ally with the USSR against China, which Rone (Patrick O’Neal) is paid to retrieve. The dirty half-dozen of freelance spooks he assembles on a globe-trotting jaunt include the Whore (Nigel Green), bribed away from running a catfight-prone Mexican bordello, and cross-dressing cabaret act Warlock (the great George Sanders, letting his smooth urbanity start to slide). Behind them all is Richard Boone’s unforgettable spymaster, a deceptively dangerous redneck with a dazzling, shit-eating grin.

John Huston (who co-wrote from the novel by US ex-spy Noel Behn) finds his focus once this motley crew reach Moscow, where Von Sydow’s chilly KGB chief works for Welles, while shacked up with the woman who fatally betrayed the letter’s previous owner. When she hires Rone as a whore and masochistically makes him beat her, only for them to fall in love, the movie serves a warning that it’s moving off the moral track into treacherous thickets of behaviour. Final layers of triple-cross recall The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but with a still bleaker ending all Huston’s own, where the hero must murder, not sacrifice, for love. What starts as a jape leaves you staring over the abyss.

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