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May 01, 2013BertBailey rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Some Things Hollywood does well, and for a 1983 thriller this was done very well. The casting is just right: William Hurt's a fine actor, and who can go wrong with a silver-haired Lee Marvin on board? Every gesture is well-delivered, with the usual loose lack of alacrity yet also his customary onscreen weightiness. Roger Ebert said about Marvin in this film that, although somewhat typecast, he brought a fully realized character “...so we don't have to stand around waiting for introductions." Brian Dennehy manages well with a good secondary role as a sort of misplaced and out-leagued ex-Marine out to learn what happened to his brother. It’s a plum role for Joanna Pacula too, a Polish actress who strikes the right notes with everything from grim cynicism and suspicion of the Soviet cop (Hurt), to her unusual, quite plausibly Muscovite colouring. Ian Bannen is also excellent in his small part, and even UK comic Alexei Sayle (Didn’t you kill my bruvah? ) has a cameo as a weasely, faintly comical black-marketeer. Best of all, Michael Apted's direction never lets up the pace under all the detail, very little of which (see comment on Marvin) involves action scenes or shoot-‘em-ups. Dennis Potter’s tight script won him the 1984 Edgar Award: the plot calls on a cast of absent characters with an involved back-story integral to the proceedings, but the script is economical, sometimes rich, and not once dated or embarrassing. James Horner crafted one of his better scores for this. Art directors seldom win prizes for drabness, but if there ever was a candidate, Ralf G. Bode’s work here is it: from the bleak flowery wallpaper and curtains to rickety Ladas, things have a pre-Gorbachev, very-Soviet flavour, before Putin and the spy services took ownership of that tyranny. We also get glimpses of the opulent apparatchiks’ hangouts, such as luxurious baths where the coffee tasted fine and the tables are stocked plush, never mind the proletariat--illustrating how communism never really was that. Filmed in Helsinki and Stockholm, this is the only Hollywood film in the last half century set in the Soviet Union – but for ‘Enemy at the Gates’ (2001; with Jude Law and Ed Harris as rival WWII sharpshooters; also recommended). A very few weak notes include a scene in a lobby where eyes don’t meet, then do, and some dialogue near the close as sentimental as in ‘Casablanca,’ though here it's not pulled off. Apted chose to keep the scene with the former, very minor gaffe; in the latter, he turns the camera away ...and the editor let him down. Yet this film is intriguing in being as much about the characters as about the plot they move through. Slowly but convincingly the distaste Pacula portrays so well transitions to a quizzical distance from Hurt, the Moscow cop who gradually shocks her, while trying to win her over, with something she cannot accept. It culminates in an extended, well-scripted scene that's one of the film’s strongest. Apted nicely litters about a few hints [spoiler to come: do beware] suggesting that this will be one of those plots, fresh for its day, where the one assigning the hero to find the killers was behind the caper – something that's since been done to death, yet maybe not quite as well. Recommended.