Listening to the winds of change

During one of the previous free preview weekends for Epix, I had the chance to record Gorky Park. It's going to be on again multiple times this week, starting tomorrow afternoon at 3:50 PM on Epix Hits (and again Friday on Epix 2 and Saturday on Epix).

One winter's night near the skating rink in Moscow's Gorky Park, somebody runs across three decomposing bodies, which is of course disconcerting. The militsiya, the local civil police (not a "militia", and a four-syllable word, despite everybody in the movie calling it the "militia"), led by Arkday Renko (William Hurt), is called in. Renko is the son of a World War II hero and good at what he does, although on previous cases he's butted heads with the KGB, something that really worries him.

He's going to have good reason to be worried, as the three bodies are clearly murder victims, with their faces and fingertips cut off so as to make identification that much more difficult. There are still small bits of evidence, with a couple of them being surprising. One is a pair of ice skates which have a woman's name on them. Renko goes to see that woman, Irina Asanova (Joanna Pacula). She's unsurprisingly evasive in her answers.

The other surprising clue is that one of the dead men has dyed red hair, and dental work using materials not currently used in Europe, identifying this man as likely American. This means a posible international incident. Indeed, Renko is invited to visit the dacha of Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy, where he meets American furrier Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), who has been importing Russian sable, one of the finest furs. There are also people from the KGB there, worrying Renko even more.

Osborne turns out not to be the only American Renko meets. One day he gets waylaid by somebody who beats the crap out of him, and in investigating further, winds up at a hotel for foreigners where he makes his way to the hotel room of one William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy). On going through Kirwill's stuff (no search warrant here, this not being the US), he finds information on the triple murder case, and parts that assemble together to make a gun -- but then Kirwill walks into his room!

It turns out that Kirwill is a police detective from New York City, and that the dead American is most likely Kirwill's kid brother James, who had studied in Moscow and who wanted to help people defect from the USSR, a very dangerous game indeed. Renko decides eventually to accept whatever help Kirwill could give him despite being constrained by being a foreigner in Moscow.

Renko also discovers that Osborne and the KGB may well be involved in the triple murders, as the three were building a chest that could hide religious icons being smuggled out of the country. Perhaps this could allow Renko to crack the case wide open, but then, there's still the KBG to deal with....

Gorky Park is a well-constructed mystery, at least up until the third act, as a longish final act is tacked on that I felt made the story bog down. Still the acting is uniformly good and nobody really tries to recreate a phony Russian accent, which is also a plus. This having been made in the Soviet era, they obviously couldn't film in Moscow, so Helsinki stands in and mostly does a good job other than a few buildings that didn't look Russian to me at all.

Gorky Park is definitely worth a watch. It's been released on DVD with TCM having it as part of a set of three movies and Amazon having the standalone DVD. Amazon also has it on Prime Video if you can do that.