the audience applauded

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Blistering performances.

I had no doubt that this effort from prolific French director Henry Verneuil ("Le Clan Des Siciliens","Mélodie En Sous-Sol",and terrific "I... comme Icare)", will be better than your usual cold war spy thriller. This is a sort of movie that mature film fan expects to see, no James Bond nonsense, no Russians that only speak broken English, no Russians with M16 rifles and ridiculous plots. This movie rings true, even 60's and 70's strongmen such as Yul Brynner is very good and very plausible as Soviet KGB colonel Alexei Vlassov, and the supporting cast of greats: Henry Fonda, Dirk Bogarde and Philippe Noiret, wee the web of high echelon government espionage, that keeps viewer guessing to the end. French title "Le Serpent" is much better than unfortunate English one ("Night flight from Moscow),that has nothing to do with plot whatsoever. Le Serpent or the serpent is a snake in the grass that strikes whenever it feels threatened. It's poison is deadly and quick, but ultimately it has to shed skin and reveal it's trail. Look for this great film if you're a fan of intelligent spy films. Satisfaction is guaranteed.

I'm not sure what problem viewers are having with the multiple languages. My DVD player lets me turn on an English-only version. No subtitles needed.I had been looking for this movie since I first saw it in 1973, and finally stumbled across it a couple of years ago. The only things I remembered was that it was a movie about a "mole," the scene where the picture of Mt. Ararat was switched, and the spy exchange at the end.This isn't the most action-packed spy movie around, and certainly isn't in the mold of '60s and '70s James Bond and 007. But in many ways it is the way espionage is really done: slow and meticulous. The pacing sort of reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The convoluted spy movie "Le serpent" ("Night Flight to Moscow" in English) features Yul Brynner as a Soviet colonel who defects to the United States, claiming that he has info about an assassination network. Much of the movie focuses on the intelligence communities in different countries investigating what he said. This probably would have been easier to watch in the cinema, since you need to know when to have subtitles turned on: they suddenly start speaking different languages at random times.It's not a great movie, but worth seeing. Just understand that this is a complicated one; no James Bond stuff here. Also starring Henry Fonda, Dirk Bogarde, Farley Granger, Philippe Noiret and Virna Lisi.

At that era, there were a lot of big production movies with a lot of international stars, something to challenge the mighty power of television back then, and the strange mood of films that hit the genres' formulas in the groins ! Maybe someday I'll give you a list of this kind of movies as it ended up mostly being flops, real proud turkeys, and another huge titanics.Here, it fulfilled all the previous conditions, yet the ambition was just well meaning. Actually after the astonishing (Z - 1969) the term "political thriller" became encouraging. 4 years later (Night Flight from Moscow) tries to make something balanced between the serious satire (the cold war is never over despite any detente), and the commercial sense of suspense, to achieve eventually mediocre work both ways. It could've been genuinely one great espionage movie where all the parties enjoying deceiving each others, but the final result was that tasteless and a little bit embarrassing putting in mind the big names.It's frigid, and that's strange when you look into the history of its director (Henri Verneuil) !, it's silly like a noir movie where all the killings and all the killers are complicatedly successive, it's idiot when you examine the evidences that finally exposed the Russians' real trick.. You've got to think whether the whole Russian intelligence is so dumb? Or the real dumb ones are whom want to convince you with some things as low as this ?! It's, though, a fest of stars, one paranoiac movie, and an early time to launch a twist that surprising ..I think, despite some weakness, it was unpredictable and even more, considering the year of production, as since the 2000s, this became ordinary fashion in movies.It deserves a view; for all the aforementioned and for the wicked sentence that (Yul Brynner) said to his watchers through the camera, plus the way he said it.