Mail Order Bride

Russian mail order bride returns home with a mobster’s cash. An associate’s nephew is sent to Moscow in care of the locals, falls in love with a hooker who’s the girl. The money gave her sister an operation, she works a scam with him for two million dollars, they meet afterward at the ninth column of the Bolshoi, a famous Russian joke. He leaves the country as a Russian paratrooper in Serbia, Kosovo and Croatia, escaping this service naked as the King of Hearts, wears a scarecrow’s clothes back to the New Jersey Turnpike.

Now he has to confront the Russian mobsters at Brighton Beach. She is there on the stage of their club, in a Marilyn Monroe wig. She loves him, has set up these fellows for the FBI, holds a million dollars for him.

One of the best films of the decade. One has never met a film critic, but one knows the amateur sort of badly overgrown teenagers with opinions, and even an art critic or two, strange people.

The points of departure are Prizzi’s Honor and Anton Grigoriov asking George Smiley, “who arr yoo, Awl Capunn?” (also Midnight in Saint Petersburg with Harry Palmer, and Marshal Sam McCloud at the Dom Kino). Even the most alienated critics noticed the location shooting, which takes off significantly from Schepisi’s work in The Russia House.

Probably they couldn’t understand how such a thing could come out of left field, and there at least one is in their company, but someone had to make this film, and here it is.