The Kremlin Letter is a 1970 American neo-noir DeLuxe Color espionage thriller in Panavision directed by John Huston and starring Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Patrick O'Neal and George Sanders. It was released in February 1970 by 20th Century-Fox. The screenplay was co-written by Huston and Gladys Hill as a faithful adaptation of the novel by Noel Behn, who had worked for the United States Army's Counterintelligence Corps. Said by reviewers to be "beautifully" and "engagingly" photographed, the film is a highly complex and amoral tale of bitter intrigue and espionage set in the winter of 1969–1970 at the height of the US-Soviet Cold War. The Kremlin Letter was a commercial failure and thinly reviewed in 1970, but the film has gathered steady praise from some critics throughout the decades since its release. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville called The Kremlin Letter "masterly" and "...saw it as establishing the standard for cinema." Plot Late in 1969, a brilliant young United States Navy intelligence officer, Charles Rone, finds his commission revoked so that he can be recruited into an espionage mission to retrieve a fake letter showing an alliance between the West and the Soviet Union against China. Rone is told that the mission is being undertaken independently of governmental intelligence agencies, as was commonplace prior to World War II, when espionage operations were handled by a small community of agents operating on a freelance basis. Rone is told that the primary operator in that community, a "brutal, sadistic, conscienceless assassin" named Robert Sturdevant, did not adapt to the post-war shift to government intelligence agencies, along with the disbanding of the independent network of spies, with Sturdevant disappearing and reportedly later committing suicide. Now, the government has suffered a significant failure in an important intelligence operation and has turned back to the independent agents for help. This time, "The Highwayman", another member of the old group of independent spies is the man leading the effort to reassemble the network to take on this mission. Another member of the group has recently died, and Rone has been tabbed as his replacement, due to Rone's exceptional analytical skills, eidetic memory and ability to speak eight languages with a native accent. Rone meets with The Highwayman and another group member, Ward, the latter of whom takes on the role of Rone's primary tutor. They first task Rone with rounding up three