Movie Info
Movie Name: Gorky Park
Studio: Eagle Associates/Major Studio Partners
Genre(s): Mystery/Suspense/Drama/Romance
Release Date(s): December 16, 1983
MPAA Rating: R
Murder most fowl in Gorky Park
Three bodies are found without their faces or fingerprints in Gorky Park. Now, Arkady Renko (William Hurt) not only has to find out who the victims are but who killed them. While working against potential killers in the KGB, he finds ties to a woman named Inna Asanova (Joanna Pacula), an American detective named William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy), and an American businessman named Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin). Who are the victims and who is responsible?
Directed by Michael Apted, Gorky Park is a suspense mystery thriller. The film is an adaptation of the 1981 novel by Martin Cruz Smith. It was met with positive reviews but a poor box office return.
I can remember when Gorky Park was a book you’d find on the shelf, and the movie was common at the video store. We had a copy of the movie taped from HBO, but I never saw more than the beginning…and the horrific bloody faces in the snow.
I’m the Emperor…of Facial Reconstruction!
In the early 1980s, Russia was a big mystery. The world of the Soviet Union and what went on there was rather unknown. Gorky Park takes a standard police procedural detective story and puts it in the weird conflict between the KGB and the Moscow militsiya who act as the police. Watching the movie in the modern day, this aspect is gone…Russia isn’t as much of a mystery, but the mystery in general is rather solid and worth visiting.
The acting is all over the place but it is mostly because of the language. The film largely adopts “Russian accents are English accents”, but it is also mixed with William Hurt’s non-English accent and actual “American” characters played by Brian Dennehy and Lee Marvin…it starts to get confusing as to where the characters are supposed to come from.
Yep…doesn’t pay to be American in the USSR
The movie gets the coldness of Russia, but obviously at the time, Russia wasn’t a viable location for filming. The film was largely shot around Finland and Sweden so it lacks the bigness of Red Square or the actual Gorky Park (Russia actually denied the right to film in Russia saying the story was anti-Russia and anti-Soviet).
Gorky Park has an intriguing set-up but it kind of is a letdown. With the fall of the Soviet Union the mystery of what lurks behind the Iron Curtain also has fallen…taking another layer of Gorky Park’s attraction away. It still has enough twists and turns to be a decent mystery at points and the discovery of the bodies is still horrific…but you can probably skip this park.
