This film takes place during the cold war with an extremely high-ranking Soviet officer by the name of "General Marenkov" (Robert Shaw) secretly expressing his desire to defect. Naturally, being quite receptive to this idea the Americans send in one of their top agents named "Harry Wargrave" (Lee Marvin) to expedite it. However, there is another military officer by the name of "Colonel Nikolai Bunin" (Maximilian Schell) who specializes in germ warfare and he has a plan which could wreak havoc on Europe so a plan is concocted to use General Marenkov as bait to flush out Colonel Bunin's agents stationed in Western Europe to prevent him from enacting his deadly scheme. The problem is that Colonel Bunin has a lot of agents and he can strike at almost any time of his choosing. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a rather odd movie which lacked the depth and realism required for a film of this sort. Likewise, I didn't care for the acting of Robert Shaw and it was only after watching the movie that I discovered that not only was he was exceedingly ill during this time but that most of his lines had to be dubbed during production as well. In any case, while I don't consider this to be a bad spy-thriller necessarily, the faults just mentioned were too obvious to be ignored and for that reason I have rated this movie accordingly. Slightly below average.
Review of Avalanche Express
