Saw The Kremlin Letter, a spy film about a smug superspy who is recruited into a group to find and destroy a politically embarrassing letter sent to the Kremlin at the height of the Cold War. The protagonist is handsome in a lumpy, dad-ish sort of way but his personality is where he really sparkles "I think I'm a superior combination of intellect and physique, athlete and scholar." Fortunately (and against genre) the film does not expect us to like or want to be this guy. He's made a fool of many times by the end of the film.
The supporting cast of wierdo spies is great. There's a brunette bombshell who can crack a safe with her toes, a cancer-riddled priest, and a homosexual who infiltrates Moscow's intellectual gay scene. The film's attitude towards sex (on that note) is somewhat chaste. We know the protagonist is sleeping with some women but it all happens off-screen, not even a winking fadeout alerting us to what's going on. Then again, in another scene, we watch leeringly as a Russian diplomat's daughter is seduced into a black woman's sapphic embrace. This is hilarious in abstract but treated by the characters as horrible perversion. I suspect in retrospect that this film was perhaps trying to be campier than I had given it credit for.
Anyway, this film is dry fun. The supporting cast and little plot flourishes are great and imaginative but the plot (which is by necessity complex and convoluted) is often delivered via quick muttery dialogues. They make sure we understand the important bits before the big punch-line ending, but I feel like I missed a point of the plot here and there. This is a nice little spy film with character. I think it's mostly for genre fans but it's not a bad film for a general audience.
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