The Russia House

Artistic production with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, but uninteresting spy story

A few years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a boozy English publisher named Barley (Sean Connery) is sent a mysterious manuscript via a beautiful Russian editor named Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), but its intercepted by British intelligence and Barley is coerced into going to Moscow & Leningrad to meet with Katya and the writer of the documents (Klaus Maria Brandauer), which contain technical data that calls into question the quality of the Soviet defense weaponry. Meanwhile both British and American agents (Roy Scheider, James Fox, et al.) surveil Barleys activities.

Based on John le Carre's novel, "The Russia House" (1990) is a spy dr...

Sean Connery at least looks like he's having some fun in this otherwise rather dry adaptation of the John Le Carré tale of Cold War espionage. He's "Barley", a publisher who is recruited by MI5 to investigate a secret document sent from the USSR purporting to itemise their nuclear arsenal. Needless to say both the British and their CIA counterparts are wetting themselves at the very thought of this being real, but that needs to be verified - and that's where they recruit "Barley". He travels to Moscow to meet the author, codenamed "Dante" (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and it's whilst there he becomes increasingly distracted by his "editor" (Michelle Pfeiffer) - a woman whom his source claims never to have met! As the plot develops, it becomes cle...