Gorky Park is one of my favorite political thriller and a film I watch regularly. I have never understood why it is not better known and better rated.
As is often with Cold War Spy films, the system is corrupt on both sides, and it's the every day people who pay the price of the greed and dishonesty of those playing the games behind the scene. The only way to survive is to be invisible and never get mixed up in a case that has political ties. William Hurt plays Arkady Renko, a Moscow police man who gets one of those cases. Three bodies are found in Gorky Park. Faces and fingertips have been removed and KGB seams to know something about this but they do not want the case. KGB does not like Arkady Renko very much since he has tried to prove their guilt once before and he is sure that they are now out for a revenge. The case is somehow connected to Jack Osborne, an American business man played by Lee Marvin.
The film does not shy away from criticizing both sides. Not only do the politics come off as hypocritical, the whole world of espionage is shown as an inhuman and cruel game of greedy and power hungry opportunists.
Some have criticized the film for not capturing the book well enough. It is rather unfair to expect a 2 hour long film to include everything from a 600 page book. A feature film of such a long book is always going to be a shortened version. I think Dennis Potter (yes the one and only) does a great job of capturing the moral bankruptcy of both systems, communism and capitalism. How they are in fact the same. Just a way to keep the little man busy and blind so those in power can get rich by corrupting the system.
Not perfect but not far from it.
