What a great shot of Babs as she appeared as safecracker B.A. in John Huston's noirish, seedy spy-story "The Kremlin Letter" (1970).

Which, I must report, is one of the best, twisty-original spy films you've never seen — and not merely because we get to see George Sanders gussied up as an old drag queen, and our old friend Paladin, Richard Boone, gone blonde.

"The Kremlin Letter" is cleverly scripted, intense and gritty, and exposes the cruelty, ruthlessness, and amorality inherent in the well-storied world of Cold War espionage. It's also as bizarrely a detailed Cold War caper movie as you'll find, which probably goes a long way to making it more likable than it might seem from some reviews, which are caustic to say the least.

The film does have its problems, including what seems to be a risky dialogue or dubbing experiment. Characters begin speaking their lines in Russian (sans English subtitles), and then switch to English mid-sentence. In "The Hunt for Red October," the actors began with a sentence in the foreign tongue, and then switched to English for good. But, if you're paying attention and have a brain bigger than a walnut, you'll get it.

Other reviewers find the story messy, dense, opaque, and convoluted — and chalk it all up to the amok auteurism that made for several critical misses in Huston's erratic period (anything he did after 1966, starting with wrecks like "The Bible: In the Beginning" and scraping bottom with 1969's "Sinful Davey"). Not me. I think the thing is brilliantly layered and supremely entertaining, not just a series of solid parts (as some have said) dogged by interstitial weaknesses that sum to something less. It is based on a book, for Chrissakes! Remember those? And this one was, as they say, labyrinthine. Noel Behn, who wrote the novel, wrote another solid, quirky spy novel rife with motley characters, "The Shadowboxer." They were the types of tales that you'd stay up late to finish.

I liken the underpinnings of a good espionage yarn to the convoluted office politics in even the smallest companies. Who does one trust absolutely? Who's really in the know about what's really going on? Who knows what's gonna happen before it does? Who pulls whose strings, and who's misdirecting who? What's the other hand doing when one hand is on your shoulder? Do we really know anything or anyone for sure? The "Wilderness of Mirrors" indeed. And it was subject matter that Huston was familiar with, from a World War II stint in the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (C-I-C).

The human-on-human chess-games going on inside the grander matches between nation-states are undeniably depressing and cynical, but that's what I look for in these more cerebro-glacial spy tales (as opposed to pure entertainments). Depictions of a cold, cruel, and senseless world running on relentless automatic — and how that plays out in the lives of the people caught up in it. Now, that's right up my espionage-lovin' alley.

Long, beautifully lensed story short, terminally ill spymaster Dean Jagger and grizzled operative Boone are two higher-level agents working for a "good" (read: Western) intelligence agency. They form a team of aging mercenaries and other pros to go into Russia to retrieve an "explosive" document whose very existence threatens the profitable status quo that the Cold War has provided for the Americans and Russians. The letter apparently implicates the United States in a plot to assist the Soviet Union in keeping nuclear brat Red China from becoming a world power. The old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" factor at work. So we have cases of strange bedfellows all over the place. The U.S. in bed with Russia to screw over the Chinese, and the unlikely assemblage of male and female spooks who both screw, and screw over, each another with abandon.

Boone is the real star here. He's a downright evil creep (referred to only as Ward) capable of anything. How vexing that he's ostensibly on the side of "right."

The team — less than crack on the surface — consists of Patrick O'Neal, Nigel Green, Parkins, and Sanders. Linguistic genius O'Neal has a photographic memory and a death-wish, and both figure into the plot's gadget-free proceedings.

Parkins' character is a virgin as well as a safecracker. I suppose that's supposed to be ironic, a Huston trademark. B.A.'s father, another old spy code-named The Erector Set, has been training her for years to replace him. She's such an accomplished thief that she can pick any combination lock with her toes while lying on her back in a purple cat-burglin' leotard. We're left wondering what else she can do on her back, in or out of the leotard, and even why she's called B.A. Beautiful Ass comes to mind.

Speaking of toes, Huston must have a thing for 'em, because we also get a scene in which one Russian agent tongue-bathes the little piggies of another. Thankfully, the little piggies belong to Swedish actress Bibi Andersson. The tongue belongs to Max von Sydow.

And speaking of irony, casting a flat-liner like the always wooden O'Neal as the "hero" (Charles Rone) is one thing, but having everyone treat him as a Bondian cocksman, is another. I'm writing it off as another Huston in-joke. But make no mistake. This is not even remotely like a slick 007 opus. "The Kremlin Letter" is all about skullduggery, scumbaggery, and physical and psychological buggery. (James Coburn was Huston's first choice to play Rone. Odd ... I've always thought that O'Neal was a serviceable Coburn if you needed a version of Coburn with the charm sucked out of him.)

The singular device I love in this thing is the notion of "The Intriguingly Named Operative." Though perhaps not so imaginatively named as the characters in the Bond films, the names here are not as campy and punny as Pussy Galore and Plenty O'Toole. They're more bent, a little mysterious, and slightly reminiscent of the oblique or downright goofy style of naming that novelist Trevanian exercises in his novels ("The Eiger Sanction," "Shibumi"). In "TKL" we have such nifty, intriguing monikers as Highwayman (Jagger), The Whore (Green), The Erector Set (Niall MacGinnis), Sweet Alice (Micheál MacLiammóir), Puppet Maker (Raf Vallone), The Negress (a lesbian seductress-blackmailer, played by Vonetta McGee), and Warlock (Sanders). There's also The Ditto Machine, The Priest, and The Dentist.

I guarantee, however, that you will be startled by the image of an extremely ancient-looking George Sanders in a blonde wig and heavy false eyelashes playing "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" on the piano in a gay bar — at a time when mainstream moviegoers could imagine what a gay bar might be.

Rounding out the inspired casting is Orson Welles, who plays a Russian spymaster, and aforementioned Bergman fixtures von Sydow and Andersson, who captivate as a lovey-dovey couple that capitalizes the K in Kink in KGB. Andersson also puts the defect in defector — she plays her character Erika as such a beautifully damaged creature that I can just watch her scenes over and over again.

And, of course, we have a nice zig-zagging plot (faithful, almost scene by scene, to Behn's complex narrative), peopled by compulsive liars and bullshitters, and full of double-crosses and unexpected reveals and side-switching.

"TKL" also boasts a fantastic tagline ...

If you miss the first five minutes, you miss one suicide, two executions, one seduction, and the key to the plot.

File under "M" for Misunderstood Flop, but also under "S" for Subzero Spy Thrillers, in the same icy-amoral vein as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965), "The Quiller Memorandum" (1966), "The Double Man" (1967), "Night Flight From Moscow" (1973), Huston's own "The Mackintosh Man" (1973), and the pinnacle, "Winter Kills" (1979).

It was ahead of its time in more than just a few ways, including its harsh depiction of homosexuality, prostitution, and organized crime in Russia, which, in 1970, ran completely counter to the propagandized image of that country as a bastion of morality standing against the corrosive tide of Westernization.

Since filming in Moscow was impossible at the time, Finnish capital Helsinki was tarted up, and comes across as a filthier Leningrad, which makes for a quite convincing stand-in for Moscow.

"The Kremlin Letter" is an obvious-to-me influence on the darkly unpatriotic spy yarns to come. The lack of patriotism I'm referring to comes from their portrayals of U.S. agents as completely corruptible, callous, duplicitous, and sadistic. This turn towards nastiness came for me in "The Black Windmill" (1974) and "3 Days of the Condor" (1975).

More? Here ...

PostScript: Perky Parky also appeared in another MooT Fave the following year, "Puppet on a Chain" (1971), based on Alistair MacLean's thriller about the Dutch drug trade. That's the movie that etched the name Sven Bertil-Taube in my memory forever.