The Kremlin Letter

#36 in my ranking of John Huston’s filmography.

Out of all the genres in film, I think it’s the thriller that’s hardest to walk into and do well. There’s a different need for structure and pacing than in most other genres, and if you walk in approaching it like you would a drama, you end up creating something flaccid rather than taut. That being said, The Kremlin Letter is probably John Huston’s worst movie (we’ll see once I get to Phobia, I guess). It’s everything wrong with James Bond wannabe films, and it recalled the languid pace of Clint Eastwood‘s The Eiger Sanction. Throw in some weird stylistic choices, and you’ve got a hard to watch, confusing mess of a film.

Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) is kicked out of the Navy when he’s recruited by the CIA to go on a mission to retrieve a letter written by an Agency head that detailed the US’s desire to join with the Soviet Union to attack China. There. That’s the first 20 minutes of this movie. Well, I guess there’s a bit more, establishing Colonel Kosnov (Max von Sydow), the main bad guy of the piece, but it’s honestly not much more.

And it’s obvious from these opening scenes how this film simply does not understand the rules of a cinematic thriller. Huston was surprised as the negative reaction for the film at the time, and one of the reasons for it was that the source novel by Noel Behn was a bestseller. Thrillers in book form and thrillers in film form are very different beasts, and I’m not sure that Huston understood that. He and his credited co-screenwriter, Gladys Hill, seem to have replicated the book to some modestly successful degree, but thriller books have this tendency for longer scenes of explanation that are anathema to cinema thrills. And what we get throughout the film, from beginning to end, is long scenes of explanation, beginning with Rone having to assemble his team.

First is the Whore (Nigel Green), a former Agency operative who has given up the life to run a brothel in Mexico. Of course, we get an extended scene of several prostitutes fighting and the Whore betting with Rone about which one will win before we ever get to the point where Rone talks to him about coming, a conversation that leads to them haggling over price. And then Rone has to go get The Erector Set (Niall MacGinnis) who isn’t going to go, but we have to get a demonstration of the skills of his daughter B.A. (Barbara Parkins) who can crack a safe with her feet. Does her safecracking come up again in the film? Nope, but we’re going to get a solid minute of her cracking that safe to establish her anyway. Just on and on it goes, spending so much time setting the stage for these people, and almost none of it actually matters all that much. In a drama, this sort of attention to detail might have worked, but in a thriller, where the audience is supposed to be on edge at some point through the whole thing, it’s just death.

The other part of this is the complexity of it all. There are so many moving parts, so many names of people we never see, and so much effort to explain it all, that it simply becomes confusing. I’d rather have a thriller with its foot on the gas pedal, moving along so fast that I miss some detail, rather than one that’s perpetually in park, making sure I get every detail and explaining it badly. There’s stuff about a dead agent’s efforts at starting a drug trade in Moscow decades before, a Russian diplomat in New York visited by Bresnavitch (Orson Welles), Kosnov’s superior, and the diplomat’s family getting kidnapped by the Agency, a dying American agent giving himself up in a diversionary move to hide their movement into Russia, and, finally, a double-agent’s wife, Erika (Bibi Andersson) who marries Kosnov and doesn’t get introduced beyond a couple of establishing shots until halfway through the film.

What makes it even worse is the romantic angle. Rone and B.A. start sleeping together, and that ends up being the basis for some kind of deeply held romance even though it’s hardly established, gets forgotten about for long stretches, ends, gets replaced by Rone acting as a gigolo to get close to Erika, falling for her, and B.A. getting close to some random Russian petty thief to move in with him for…reasons. I think he’s connected somehow to one of the players? There is just so much detail that it’s just hard to care about any of it.

Really, this needed to be cleared out and reapproached with the idea that it was a two hour film, not a 300 page novel.

And, on top of it all, the whole operation is being run by Ward (Richard Boone), a flagrantly American character in the middle of Soviet Russia and is obviously not entirely who he says he is.

Huston made a conscious stylistic choice that could have been interesting except that he way overuses it. In a film where several languages should be getting spoken, he starts some scenes (only some) with the characters speaking in their native tongues with the actors themselves then providing voiceover in English before the native tongue falls away to be replaced by English. Now, if that had happened once, I’d just call it an awkward little stylistic choice that wasn’t worthy of much note, but it keeps happening again and again and again. There are scenes of just a couple minutes long where less than half the dialogue is covered in English directly that are then followed by a subsequent scene that does the same thing. I was reminded of the elegant way that John McTiernan worked with a similar idea in The Hunt for Red October, handling the transition once from subtitles to English, and then never bringing up the language barrier again until Russian and American characters are in the same boat. That Huston keeps going back to it repeatedly is almost parodic in nature.

So, no. This is a mess. It’s terrible. It’s hard to watch. It’s impossible to keep track of. It’s overcomplicated, unmoored from any real emotion, and just a complete drag. I should note that Jean-Pierre Melville loved this movie completely, though, and I kind of get it from his perspective. There’s a coolness and stark reality to much of the action and violence that was obviously in his wheelhouse. The difference between how Melville approached that kind of thriller-like filmmaking versus how Huston did was that Melville’s films were stark and bare in terms of plot detail, letting the feel of the film dominate while focusing on character whereas Huston piles in so much detail that the mood becomes a distraction rather than an asset.

Huston was simply out of his depth here. He had no idea how to make a thriller, and it showed.

Rating: 0.5/4