Very well executed

Brilliant and touching

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Not terrible, this film has a number of twists, a complex plot and looks good even today.However, it is also burdened with a rather dull narrative of long in the tooth spies, doing things their way, in a free enterprise rootin tootin western in russia. Plus it has patrick oneill in some rather implausible love scenes with much younger women. It seems to exist in a world the director wishes to live in rather than a believable one.The ending is the best part. Devastatingly bleak

We are dealing with a few sacred monsters, starting with director John Huston (who casted himself in a small role in the film), then Orson Welles and George Sanders. Nigel Green, Richard Boone, Patrick O'Neal, are not sacred monsters, but they do their job well, are good actors. Barbara Parkins (the beauty from "Puppet on a Chain", "Bear Island" and "Valley of the Dolls") is a sexy innocence. Bibi Andersson(a favorite of Ingmar Bergman) makes a great role. Max von Sydow (another favorite of Ingmar Bergman) is brilliant too, as usual. And the great actress Lila Kedrova (Madame Hortense in "Zorba the Greek") has a role too small for her huge talent. A very special film about the sacrifices that spies have to make for their own homelands... or others homelands.

I've watched this movie a number of times since shortly after it was released, and my appreciation for it has declined over time. Huston not only directed but wrote the screenplay, so you know going in it's no fool's work. He tried to do something more serious more serious than a James Bond movie. By piercing the gray exterior of Soviet life, it disrupted some stereotypes and assumptions that our propaganda had created, such as not being able to enter a country like the USSR without being detected, and that Soviet officials were boring bureaucrats who weren't corrupt high-livers, and that criminality was not widespread in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. The problem is that Huston just made up a lot of stuff, or made it look as though he had in a rather clumsy way, and couldn't resist some completely implausible James Bond touches. Thirteen years later "Gorky Park" improved considerably on this groundwork, though not without similar errors. For pointing the way, though not for his own offering, Huston deserves credit.

If you like machine-gun edited, absurd, comic-book nonsense like the Bourne trilogy, don't waste your time watching Kremlin Letter. It's a million light-years away compared to that kind of video-game spy flick. You have to watch every second of this film to know what's going on and use your brain to keep pace of the plot twists and turns. Richard Boone and Patrick O'Neil, two underrated actors who never gave a bad performance, are riveting and Barbara Parkins never looked more alluring. The Russian/English over dubbing has been criticized but I enjoyed the technique. I've never seen it used since. The chilling ending begged for a sequel that never happened.