Blu-ray Release Date: July 12, 2016
Price: Blu-ray $29.95
Studio: Twilight Time
The soulful 1990 screen version of spy novelist John le Carré’s 1989 best-seller The Russia House was directed by Fred Schepisi (Words and Pictures) from an adaptation by Tom Stoppard (Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love).
Iconic leading man Sean Connery (The Man Who Would Be King) plays an apolitical English expatriate publisher in Russia unexpectedly drawn into a war of wits and wills when a Soviet book editor, portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer, drafts him into smuggling the notebooks of an activist scientist (Klaus Maria Brandauer, Tetro) out of the country. The operation is complicated by the machinations of British and American intelligence, embodied by a terrific ensemble that includes Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, J.T. Walsh, Michael Kitchen, Ian McNeice, David Threlfall, Martin Clunes and, in a rare and spiffy acting turn, director Ken Russell.
The first time a Western film company was provided access to shoot inside the Soviet Union, the film transformed – via cinematographer Ian Baker’s Technovision camera – the chillingly modern and romantically Old World Moscow and St. Petersburg into effective locations for both spycraft and the touching assignation between Connery and Pfeiffer.
Composer Jerry Goldsmith’s boozy, jazzy score is showcased on an isolated track on Twilght Time’s Blu-ray release.
As supplier Twilight Time prints up only 3,000 copies of each title, be sure to keep on the Twilight Time site or that of distributor Screen Archives for the June 29 prebook date!
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