No Honour Among Spies: Revisiting The Kremlin Letter

Scarcely a day goes by without being worn down by the Maxwell murk, the sordid doings of the incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell still dominate news pages, as does the spectre of her deceased father, the larger-than-life media mogul Robert Maxwell who died under mysterious circumstances. It has been alleged that Robert Maxwell was a triple agent, doing business with the Mossad, the MI6 and the KGB.

In the sordid grey zones where money, state secrets and sexual leverage collide, the Maxwells seem more like characters out of a certain kind of cinema. The one film where they might have fit seamlessly is John Huston’s ‘The Kremlin Letter’ (1970) - a Cold War film so unrelentingly bleak and acidic in its moral vision that it makes ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ feel almost sentimental.

‘The Kremlin Letter,’ an adaptation of Noel Behn’s now-forgotten Cold War bestseller, follows a rogue network of spies tasked with retrieving a forged American letter that if discovered, could spark a global conflagration by suggesting a US-Soviet collusion to topple Red China.

The plot is a confounding skein of codenames, betrayals and reversals. But plot is beside the point as the film hurtles the viewer into a pitiless world where everyone is lying and no one believes in anything.

If John le Carré entrenched a bleak chiaroscuro in Cold War fiction, painted in the greys of bureaucratic compromise and personal corrosion, then ‘The Kremlin Letter’ takes amorality to a stratospheric level. Where le Carré’s George Smiley manoeuvres through a fog of conscience and betrayal, Huston’s spies are 24-carat nihilists who give two figs about democracy or Communism.

Huston dives into the material’s absurdity with deadpan relish. What ‘The Kremlin Letter’ ruthlessly dissects is not just the spy game, but the very conceit that espionage ever had anything to do with ideals.

Huston, who so memorably tackled human failing in classics like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941) and ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ (1948) was one of the few directors who could match the material’s cynicism beat for beat and still find artistry within the sordidness. Even serious espionage films of the 1960s typically required a centre of gravity or some redemptive arc. ‘The Kremlin Letter’ strips everything away, offering no comfort to the viewer.

Yet, the stellar cast makes the murk mesmerising. While Patrick O’Neal anchors the film with a cool, affectless poise, it is those surrounding him who truly crackle with menace and charisma. George Sanders appears, improbably and irresistibly, in drag while Orson Welles (as the bloated Russian general Bresnavitch) delivers menace with the languor of a man perpetually between meals.

Bergman regular Max von Sydow plays a KGB officer so reptilian he might be made of permafrost. Another Bergman favourite Bibi Andersson, best known for her ethereal turns, embodies Nordic spy kink, playing seduction not as erotic art but as bizarre psychological warfare.

The real scene-stealer of these strange proceedings, however, is Richard Boone. Relegated too often to television Westerns, Boone delivers an effortless performance of casual menace, with sadism simmering just below the surface. As Ward, a shady operator whose true affiliations are unclear to the end, Boone fuses paternal charm with ancient cunning, coming across as a genuinely scary spook.

The bleak worldview espoused by The Kremlin Letter was not conjured in a vacuum. With the arrival of le Carré on the literary scene, disillusionment is spy fiction was taken to another level, leaving behind even Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Works like ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ and ‘The Looking Glass War’ exposed the grey underbelly of Western intelligence.

This simultaneously translated in film, with a distinct anti-Bond cinematic tradition emerging in the 1960s with ‘The Ipcress File,’ ‘The Deadly Affair,’ ‘A Dandy in Aspic’ and ‘The Quiller Memorandum’ that completely de-glamorized the genre, depicting its protagonists as world-weary functionaries undone by bureaucracy and betrayal.

‘The Kremlin Letter’ inhabits the tail end of this tradition, standing as a relic of a brief, brilliant period that painted espionage in its most un-heroic colours. The film’s demands attention, and its convoluted narrative left most viewers and critics baffled upon its release.

But for those willing to persist, it stands as one of the most sinister and slyly subversive entries in Cold War cinema. With our epoch increasingly marked by great power cynicism and intelligence skulduggery, ‘The Kremlin Letter’ feels all too prescient.