The Russia House

Release date:1990

Directed by:Fred Schepisi

Rated:

Runtime:122 minutes

The Russia House is an American spy drama, based on the novel of the same name by John le Carré. It was directed by Fred Schepisi, and starred Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, with Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, and Klaus Maria Brandauer in supporting roles. It was filmed on... location in the Soviet Union, only the second American motion picture to do so before the dissolution of the socialist state . Bartholomew "Barley" Scott Blair , the head of a British publishing firm, is on a business trip to Moscow. He attends a writers' retreat where he speaks of an inevitable New World Order on its way and an end to tension with the West. Attentively listening is a man called Dante , who wants to be convinced that Barley means what he says. It transpires that Dante has secretly written a book about the Soviet Union's true nuclear missile capabilities. A few months later, unable to locate Barley at a sales fair, a Russian woman named Katya Orlova asks another publishing company's representative, Niki Landau , to pass along a very important manuscript.
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Spy fiction, literature concerning the forms of espionage, was a sub-genre derived from the novel during the nineteenth century, which then evolved... into a discrete genre before the First World War , when governments established modern intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure , the thriller and the politico–military thriller . In nineteenth-century France, the Dreyfus Affair contributed much to public interest in espionage. For some twelve years , the Affair, which involved elements of international espionage, treason, and anti-Semitism, dominated French politics. The details were reported by the world press: an Imperial German penetration agent betraying to Germany the secrets of the General Staff of the French Army; the French counter-intelligence riposte of sending a charwoman to rifle the trash in the German Embassy in Paris, were news that inspired successful spy fiction.
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