House Party

Although Ms. Spenser specializes in horror, she has been reading some le Carre lately, so I thought I'd queue up The Russia House (1990). Starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, with a script by Tom Stoppard from the le Carre novel, how could it lose?

It starts in a nice round about way: Russian Michelle Pfeiffer walks into a Russian-European publishers' book fair looking for Barley Blair (Connery), while a discussion in voiceover talks about him. He isn't there, so she reluctantly gives the Englishman in the next booth a manuscript for him. Back at the hotel, he looks inside, and realizes that the English government needs to see it. It is a set of notebooks showing that the perestroika Soviet military is a paper tiger. It is revealed that the voiceover discussion is the "Russia House", English intelligence Russian operation, as well as CIA, etc, looking for Connery.

They find him in Lisbon, getting drunk, and bring him in for a talk. He denies knowing Pfeiffer or anyone similar. But there was this time at a Russian writers' retreat and booze-up at a country dacha. Connery was spouting off about the importance of betraying any warlike government - English, American, Russian, whatever. A quiet drunk who went by Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) approaches him and asks for a promise: If Dante ever decides to be a hero, will Connery be a decent human being? So, presumably, the manuscript comes from Dante (whoever that is).

So they send him to Moscow to find out more. He meets Pfeiffer and is immediately smitten. But he needs to find out if the manuscript can be trusted, if she can be trusted, and if being a spy is really what he wants to do.

Connery is great in this role. He's a lazy, hard-drinking blowhard, with ideals that he doesn't really try to live up to. He goes along with the spy games out of inertia more than patriotism, and because it may improve the chances of world peace and Russian freedom. Then, he does it because he is falling in love with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer's role is a little easier - a creditable Russian accent and that old Soviet sense of resignation covering rebellion. The spy masters are a fun little group of character actors, including Roy Scheider, Charles John Mahoney, and Kurt Russell (!) as a red-faced, white-haired, foul-mouthed Brit.

The script is clever, especially in the first act, where we get discussions and surveillance recordings in the spy world mixed with the actual happenings. This goes on throughout, although we settle into Connery's viewpoint more and more. In the end, the Brit running Connery has an intuition, and Scheider has the opposite. This is what we love about le Carre - with no reliable information, from another country, spy masters must decide who to trust and figure out the lay of the land. Those who do it well succeed, and most don't. For the spy in the field, it's a little different.