Gorky Park is a 1983 murder mystery that takes place in Russia.
7 out of 10 stars. This is an older film, but a very good one.
This has a very long and involved plot. Here’s a brief summary.
Three bodies are found frozen in the snow next to the skating rink of Gorky Park in Moscow. Their faces have been removed. Arkady Renko is the police detective assigned to the case and from the very beginning, the KGB butt their noses in and keep blocking his progress.
Renko takes the heads of the three bodies to a college professor who can reconstruct faces from clay and the typical depth measurements of facial tissue. The skates on the dead female trace back to a young girl named Irina Asanova. Renko interviews her several times before she admits that she loaned the skates to her friend, but that her friend couldn’t possibly be the dead girl because she was smuggled out of the country by a millionaire American furrier named Jack Osborne.
Renko starts looking into Jack Osborne and finds an American police detective dogging him. That man turns out to be William Kirwill and one of the dead males was his younger brother who had fallen in love with a Russian girl and was trying to smuggle her out.
Renko eventually finds where Asanova’s friend, Kirwill’s brother, and the third victim were living. There are remnants and pieces lying around suggesting they were making religious chests for Osborne. And what he further discovers is that those chests were to hide six live sables. Apparently Osborne was tired of paying exorbitant prices for the sable furs he sells in the U.S. He hired the three to make the chests in exchange for smuggling the Russian girl and the third friend into the U.S. so they could be with Kirwill’s brother. But when they realized he was smuggling live sables in those chests, he killed them and removed their faces in an attempt to prevent identification.
Arkady goes to arrest Osborne against the orders of the KGB and there’s a shootout. Kirwill dies. So does Osborne. So do the KGB there to protect Osborne. Arkady lives and releases the sables. At the end of the film he takes Asanova to the airport, presumably to go to the U.S.
7 out of 10 stars. This is a well-crafted plot with some stunning views of Russia.
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