The Russia House

Sean Connery and John le Carré both died at the end of last year. They were both involved in the making of the movie The Russia House. It's going to be on various channels in the Cinemax package over the next week, starting with an airing at 8:41 AM tomorrow on ThrillerMax.

Connery plays Barley Blair, a British publisher who at the start of the movie is being interrogated by British intelligence about somebody about whom he knows nothing, Katya Orlova. Barley has been working on good relations with the Soviet Union through the promotion of British literature in the Soviet Union and, at some point, Katya tries to get in touch with him at a trade fair with a letter and a manuscript from a mysterious source named "Dante". That manuscript suggests that the Soviet Union is not prepared at all to fight a nuclear war as their targeting systems really don't work. British intelligence, led by agent Ned (James Fox), wants Barley to go to Moscow and find Katya, and have her get him in touch with Dante, to find out who he is and if the manuscript is accurate.

Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) had apparently met Barley at a dacha party after a previous trade show, one of those things where everybody gets starry-eyed and thinks they can solve all of the world's problems over a few drinks, so he already is at least a bit familiar with the guy. Meanwhile, Ned is trying to teach Barley the basics about how to be a spy, which boils down to you're going to be heard and followed no matter what you try, so do what you can.

Barley meets Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer) and you just know that the two are going to fall in love, but she's also able to get him in touch with Dante again, who turns out to be a physicist named Yakov Savelyev. Dante gives Barley more information, even though he's not so sure he can trust Barley since Dante knows the western intelligence agencies have the first part of the manuscript.

Meanwhile, Ned has been keeping the CIA informed of what's going on, who have assigned Russell (Roy Scheider) and his boss Brady (John Mahoney) to run the American side of the operation. Unfortunately for Ned, and even more unfortunate for Barley, Katya, and Dante, the CIA decides that it wants more control over the operation, in part because they don't want it known that Soviet nuclear capability isn't what it seems. They have to keep their defense contractors happy.

The spy story in The Russia House is a bit convoluted at times and formulaic at others in the conspiracy theory angle (although, as it's turned out in recent years, there certainly is a Permanent State in the intelligence agencies and other branches of government whose interested only coincidentally align with those of the elected officials and the people who elected them; one need only watch an episode of Yes, Minister, or see what the British civil service did to try to sabotage Brexit or what America's Permanent State did over the last four years). The love story angle doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either. But the movie does ultimately work, I think.

Part of this is down to a couple of good supporting performances, from Fox, Mahoney, and Brandauer. But the bigger part is the locations. The Russia House was released in 1990, and was one of the first western films to be shot on location in the Soviet Union, with a lot of locations in Moscow and the then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) being used. Having studied in St. Petersburg for a semester and spending a week on break in Moscow in 1992, it was fun to try to identify the locations, especially in Petersburg. (Our dorm was just down the street from the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel, which is right near the Gulf of Finland.) The production design also reminded me a lot of the interiors I got to see when I was there, although I'm not certain exactly how much of the interior work was done in the Soviet Union and how much was recreated in London.

But the time and milieu in which The Russia House was made is also why the movie has fallen into obscurity. The movie was released in December 1990, just eight months before the abortive coup attempt that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. All the spy agencies utterly missed this, and that whole Cold War went by the wayside (or at least was supposed to). This made the movie dated very quickly after release, a heck of a lot more quickly than most other movies.

The Russia House is available on Prime Video, and unsurprisingly it seems to have fallen out of print on DVD.