Sandor Eles) as Lieutenant Grodin Vonetta McGee as "The Negress" Anthony Chinn as Kitai Niall MacGinnis as "The Erector Set" Cyril Shaps as Police Doctor John Huston as the Admiral Production The film shows its characters speaking Russian without the use of English subtitles by either having the characters speaking Russian while supplying simultaneous voiced-over English translation or else beginning such scenes in Russian and then segueing into English. The film was planned to be shot over 17 weeks, with 13 weeks at Dino De Laurentiis' studio in Rome, Italy; 2 weeks in Helsinki and one week in both Mexico and New York City. As the producers were not able to film in Moscow, many of the scenes set in Moscow were filmed in the Finnish capital city of Helsinki which features neoclassical buildings similar to those in Leningrad. Filming locations in New York included the Hispanic Society of America, Central Park Zoo and Greenwich Village. Mostly aerial stock footage from the summer of 1969 showing Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City is also seen in the film. Reaction Box Office According to Fox records the film required $10,100,000 in rentals to break even and by 11 December 1970 had made $3,425,000. By September 1970 the studio recorded a loss of $3,939,000 on the film to the studio. Critical The film was subject to criticism upon its release. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called the movie "depressing." Variety had already noted in a pre-release review that The Kremlin Letter "...makes for valuable viewing, but with the piecing together [it is] another thing. Thus is this nastiness of the spy business graphically described. It is an engagingly photographed piece of business." A much later TV Guide review said the film was "Beautifully photographed... [but] a hopelessly convoluted spy drama with so many intricate interweavings that you truly need a scorecard to keep track of the plotters." Much later, fan-author Jerry Kutner wrote "Among the films of 1970, John Huston's The Kremlin Letter was as unself-consciously noir as his '40s and '50s work." Craig Butler of Allmovie wrote, "Although it has its partisans, most consider The Kremlin Letter to be a big disappointment... the plot of the novel upon which it is based is simply too dense to be translated to the screen in a film of normal length." Butler went on to note that "Richard Boone