Gorky Park is William Hurt's finest film role, bar none.
It is 1983, it is Moscow, and Hurt is Arkady Renko, a skilled but low-rung detective for the local military police, known as the Militia.
Renko is called one wintry night to the scene of a grisly triple murder, the bodies found hard by the public skating rink of Gorky Park. As soon as he arrives to the scene, so do the lethal agents of the Militia's rival agency, the KGB. Renko not only has a hard case to solve, he's got hard rivals watching as he tries to go about it. Strange.
The film leaps from a delicately constructed whodunit into a major drama within minutes, as Renko happens across his first witness, the young Russian film assistant Irina. Searingly acted by the gifted Joanna Pacula, there is instant chemistry, confusion, and delightful tension between the male and female leads, and it starts the viewer off into a more modernized version of Casablanca, but with a winching plot that actually keeps us on edge.
With two major exceptions, the wider cast of "Soviets" are British, and they are a group of supporting all-stars. Ian Bannen as the viperish prosecutor Iamskoy and Ian "Palpatine" McDiarmid in a heavy cameo as a creepy-cool facial reconstructionist deserve special mention.
Lee Marvin and Brian Dennehy are Hurt's co-stars. Both play Americans. For the unwatched, it would spoil some of the fun to hint at whether either of their characters is the heavy, rather it suffices to say that Marvin's role is quintessential Marvin and Dennehy has never done a better Dennehy role than his turn in this film. You get just what those names promise from the Playbill.
But William Hurt is the film's core, soul, and mainstay. He does it all, from fighting to quiet psychologies to loving on the stunning, vulnerable, feral Irina, with a deep, brooding, unaffected humanity and sense of the inexorable. Hurt is a wonderful actor and he truly is Shakespearean in stature here as "Arkady beset by Moscow."
One quibble. The film's opening credit sequence and introductory shots were economized. With a larger investment and more thoughtful ideas for the main title sequence, perhaps some minor re-jiggering of imagery of the fallen snow as metaphor for the rest of the film, Gorky Park might today be talked about alongside a Breakfast at Tiffany's or a Lawrence of Arabia. The remainder of the film is about that great.
Film students and aspiring auteurs should watch Gorky Park, again and again.
It is 1983, it is Moscow, and Hurt is Arkady Renko, a skilled but low-rung detective for the local military police, known as the Militia.
Renko is called one wintry night to the scene of a grisly triple murder, the bodies found hard by the public skating rink of Gorky Park. As soon as he arrives to the scene, so do the lethal agents of the Militia's rival agency, the KGB. Renko not only has a hard case to solve, he's got hard rivals watching as he tries to go about it. Strange.
The film leaps from a delicately constructed whodunit into a major drama within minutes, as Renko happens across his first witness, the young Russian film assistant Irina. Searingly acted by the gifted Joanna Pacula, there is instant chemistry, confusion, and delightful tension between the male and female leads, and it starts the viewer off into a more modernized version of Casablanca, but with a winching plot that actually keeps us on edge.
With two major exceptions, the wider cast of "Soviets" are British, and they are a group of supporting all-stars. Ian Bannen as the viperish prosecutor Iamskoy and Ian "Palpatine" McDiarmid in a heavy cameo as a creepy-cool facial reconstructionist deserve special mention.
Lee Marvin and Brian Dennehy are Hurt's co-stars. Both play Americans. For the unwatched, it would spoil some of the fun to hint at whether either of their characters is the heavy, rather it suffices to say that Marvin's role is quintessential Marvin and Dennehy has never done a better Dennehy role than his turn in this film. You get just what those names promise from the Playbill.
But William Hurt is the film's core, soul, and mainstay. He does it all, from fighting to quiet psychologies to loving on the stunning, vulnerable, feral Irina, with a deep, brooding, unaffected humanity and sense of the inexorable. Hurt is a wonderful actor and he truly is Shakespearean in stature here as "Arkady beset by Moscow."
One quibble. The film's opening credit sequence and introductory shots were economized. With a larger investment and more thoughtful ideas for the main title sequence, perhaps some minor re-jiggering of imagery of the fallen snow as metaphor for the rest of the film, Gorky Park might today be talked about alongside a Breakfast at Tiffany's or a Lawrence of Arabia. The remainder of the film is about that great.
Film students and aspiring auteurs should watch Gorky Park, again and again.