Review of Midnight in Saint Petersburg

What saves this film is the many glorious sightseeing tours all around the beautiful Saint Petersburg with its canals and churches and incredible palaces, and the beautiful music by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Chopin like an exquisite frame around a very ordinary picture. Michael Caine was not happy about this film and I guess nobody was. It's a very ordinary plot about political intrigue involving the stealing of some plutonium and using it for international extortion, for which case Harry Palmer is summoned to Saint Petersburg to bring some order into the mess of the chaos of Yeltsin's Russia with maffias setting the rules, bringing out the worst nightmares of Chicago in the bootlegging days, and with Michael Gambon as some pope of the criminal underground world, using pretty girls for his schemes, not entirely successfully, as not even Michael Caine is easily fooled by a beautiful girl. The film gives a vivid picture of the random lawlessness of Yeltsin's Russia with privatisation turning the country upside down by capitalistic turmoil in the hands of gangsters, but all you will remember of the film is all the beautiful sceneries of Saint Petersburg. There are some great ballet scenes as well and visits at a circus and a very posh night club, but forget about the plutonium. It was all fake, invented by the author to make a best-seller.