Micky Spillane, USSR s

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-ne Reo Jup iner "On the way home, a punk stopped me on the street — he said, 'You gotta light mac?' I said, 'No, but I gotta dark brown overcoat.' ARKADY Renko, private eye - except that this is the Soviet Union and Arkasha is a Militia Investigator.

Based on the book by Martin Cruz Smith, 'Gorky Park' opens with the discovery of three corpses under the snow in this popular Moscow park.

Faces and fingertips have been sliced off to prevent identification - 'it looks like a KGB job"

To Renko (William Hurt) it smells like a set up, but his boss promises him all the official protection he feels he needs to go with the investigation. He needs to put faces to the skulls, so he goes to see the professor who probably put Lenin back together when he started crumbling in the mausoleum.

Meanwhile a decadent American, name of Osborne (Lee Marvin) dealing in sable. fur and cracking jokes about Soviet justice to an equally decadent audience of cynical bureaucrats. becomes the main suspect.

I'd read the book and went to see 'the film of the book' but it might as well have been Martin Barclay reviews the film 'Gorky Park' Micky Spillane's Mike Hammer as Comrade Renko.

Even the sexual, sexist, interest is there in the form of • woman Siberian dissident with an out-of-town accent who wants to get to the West.

I kept looking tor the neon sign lazily flashing on and off outside the apartment window, but the only adverts were wall-sized portraits of this funny looking guy with a bald head and pointed beard.

Gone are the book's subtle social observations about Moscow life - the queues, the winter cold and the closeness of it all. Gone too is the delicate sense of balance of a middle rank bureaucrat in a big, brutal bureaucracy.

Otherwise the first two-thirds of the film follow the intricate plot of the book fairly closely, even improving it in ABSURDITY A man tried to kill Ronald Reagan. He was interrogated by psychiatrist Ronald Reagan said "I can envisage limited nuclear war Nobody questioned his sanity.

His sanity was never questioned. parts — Alexei Sayle's blackmarketeer is not to be missed. But the rest of the film could Gary Scott be straight out of 'Dirty Harry' which seems - it's the avenging cop American film against the system routine tive stories. to dominate TV detecThe long, intense and dramatic sequence where Renko is spirited away by the KGB and psychologically broken in the classic Stalinist way is scrapped for a few slick scenes in Stockholm.

The final showdown in New York is swapped for a shootout at the sable corral before the hero walks off into the (red) sunset.

If you've read the book then don't see the film. If you want to see a good detective story that's a bit out of the ordinary, this is for you. But read the book afterwards and see what you missed.