''Company Business'' is a 1991
action
Action may refer to:
* Action (narrative), a literary mode
* Action fiction, a type of genre fiction
* Action game, a genre of video game
Film
* Action film, a genre of film
* ''Action'' (1921 film), a film by John Ford
* ''Action'' (1980 fil ...
film, written and directed by
Nicholas Meyer and starring
Gene Hackman and
Mikhail Baryshnikov. The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd (
Gene Hackman), a former operative for the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (
Mikhail Baryshnikov), a captured
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
mole
Mole (or Molé) may refer to:
Animals
* Mole (animal) or "true mole", mammals in the family Talpidae, found in Eurasia and North America
* Golden moles, southern African mammals in the family Chrysochloridae, similar to but unrelated to Talpida ...
, to a
prisoner exchange
A prisoner exchange or prisoner swap is a deal between opposing sides in a conflict to release prisoners: prisoners of war, spies, hostages, etc. Sometimes, dead bodies are involved in an exchange.
Geneva Conventions
Under the Geneva Conven ...
in recently reunited
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
.
Plot
With the
Cold War rapidly coming to an end, retired
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
operative Sam Boyd has taken up freelancing as a corporate spy for cosmetics giant Maxine Gray, only to find that his hands-on style of espionage is being rendered obsolete by the capabilities of younger computer hackers. Boyd is suddenly called back in to the CIA by his superior, Elliot Jaffe, for a seemingly straightforward prisoner exchange with the
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
overseen by Colonel Pierce Grissom. Jaffe and Grissom explain that they have to use Boyd instead of an active agent to keep the operation off-the-books, since the $2 million that the Russian side demanded in addition to their own agent is being supplied by a Colombian
drug cartel
A drug cartel is any criminal organization with the intention of supplying drug trafficking operations. They range from loosely managed agreements among various drug traffickers to formalized commercial enterprises. The term was applied when th ...
as a favor. Boyd is tasked with chaperoning Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko, a KGB mole who had been caught and imprisoned ten years earlier, and the briefcase containing the money to
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
, where they will both be traded for Benjamin Sobel, a
U-2 pilot who was shot down over the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
during the 1960s.
A resigned Boyd and a skeptical Grushenko depart from
Dulles Airport
Washington Dulles International Airport , typically referred to as Dulles International Airport, Dulles Airport, Washington Dulles, or simply Dulles ( ), is an international airport in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Eastern United States, loc ...
and arrive in Berlin, where they bond at a bar over Grushenko's beverage of choice,
Starka. During the handover in a closed stretch of subway tunnel the next night, Boyd recognizes Sobel as a man he noticed at Dulles and calls Grushenko back, triggering a shootout with the KGB. Boyd and Grushenko are forced on the run from both the KGB and Boyd's superiors; even though Boyd told Jaffe that the handover was a setup, Grissom insists that Boyd has gone rogue and orders Jaffe to hunt him and Grushenko down. Boyd and Grushenko decide their only option is go into hiding and live off the $2 million, but they first need to
launder the cash since the CIA can track the serial numbers on the bills. After securing fake IDs and credit cards and evading a police dragnet, the pair go to Faisal, a Saudi arms dealer previously used by the CIA to support anti-communist movements, to see about the money, but find that the easing of the Cold War has left him practically impoverished.
With the CIA now working with the KGB to find Boyd and Grushenko, the pair make their way to
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
, where Grushenko claims to have a girlfriend who can handle their money problem. Grushenko also reveals to Boyd that the man in the subway really was Sobel, who had been turned by the Soviets after his capture and was living in America as a sleeper agent in the guise of an economics professor. Grushenko knew Sobel because they both had the same handler, a turncoat in the US military codenamed "Donald". Boyd concludes that the cash-strapped KGB had arranged the fake handover of Sobel with Donald's help to scam the CIA out of $2 million, but the botched trade had jeopardized Donald's cover. In Paris, Grushenko reunites with his apparent girlfriend, Natasha Grimaud, who is in reality his daughter and works at a Japanese corporation where she can wire their money to a Swiss bank account to be withdrawn as clean bills. While Grushenko travels to Switzerland to retrieve the money, the CIA/KGB kidnap Natasha to coerce Boyd and Grushenko into surrendering. Boyd concedes to their demands chooses the
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower ( ; french: links=yes, tour Eiffel ) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
Locally nicknamed "' ...
as the handover site. Boyd and Grushenko manage to free Natasha and then dodge the CIA/KGB, but find the tower's exits have been cut off. The two friends duck into ''
Le Jules Verne'' to share one last bottle of Starka. After Boyd suggests that they should take up residence in the
Seychelles
Seychelles (, ; ), officially the Republic of Seychelles (french: link=no, République des Seychelles; Creole: ''La Repiblik Sesel''), is an archipelagic state consisting of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. Its capital and largest city, ...
if they somehow escape, Grushenko relates that he just called Donald, implied to be Grissom, and left a false message that Sobel had been a triple-agent for the CIA all along.
Cast
*
Gene Hackman as Sam Boyd
*
Mikhail Baryshnikov as Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko
*
Kurtwood Smith
Kurtwood Larson Smith (born July 3, 1943) is an American television and film actor. He is known for playing Clarence Boddicker in ''RoboCop'' (1987), Robert Griggs in ''Rambo III'' (1988), and Red Forman in ''That '70s Show'' (1998–2006), as ...
as Elliot Jaffe
*
Terry O'Quinn
Terrance Quinn (born July 15, 1952), known professionally as Terry O'Quinn, is an American actor. He played John Locke on the TV series ''Lost'', the title role in '' The Stepfather'' and '' Stepfather II'', and Peter Watts in ''Millennium'', ...
as Col. Pierce Grissom aka "Donald"
*
Daniel von Bargen
Daniel von Bargen (June 5, 1950 – March 1, 2015) was an American character actor of film, stage and television. He was known for his roles as Mr. Kruger on ''Seinfeld'', Commandant Edwin Spangler on ''Malcolm in the Middle'', and Chief Grady ...
as Mike Flinn
*
Oleg Rudnik as Col. Grigori Golitsin
* Géraldine Danon as Natasha Grimaud
*
Nadim Sawalha
Nadim Joakim Sawalha ( ar, نديم صوالحة) (born 9 September 1935) is a Jordanian-British actor, the father of actresses Nadia and Julia Sawalha. He appeared in two Bond films, '' The Spy Who Loved Me'' (1977) and '' The Living Daylights' ...
as Faisal
* Michael Tomlinson as Dick Maxfield
*
Bob Sherman as Benjamin Sobel
*
Howard McGillin
Howard McGillin (born November 5, 1953, in Los Angeles, California) is an American actor. He is known for his role of John Jasper in ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood'' and for portraying the role The Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber's ''The Phantom of ...
as Bruce Wilson
*
Louis Eppolito
Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito were former New York City Police Department (NYPD) detectives who worked on behalf of the Five Families of the American Mafia, principally the Lucchese crime family, Lucchese and Gambino crime family, Gambino ...
as Paco Gonzalez
*
Adèle Anderson as Marlene
* Toby Eckholt as Nerdy Young Man
* Elsa O'Toole as Receptionist Maxine Gray Cosmetics
* Kate Harper as Secretary
*
Shane Rimmer as Chairman, Maxine Gray Cosmetics
Production
Development
According to writer/director Nicholas Meyer's memoir ''The View from the Bridge'', Meyer decided to try his hand at writing an original screenplay at the behest of then
CAA co-chairman
Rick Nicita
Rick Nicita (born Charles Richard Nicita, 15 December 1945) is an American entertainment executive, talent agent, and motion picture/TV producer. Nicita is a former co-chairman and managing partner of Creative Artists Agency.
Career William Morr ...
. Due to the changing political environment in the Soviet Union, Meyer was forced to quickly finish his screenplay "that struggled to reflect fast-moving events in
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russia, whic ...
, where the
Berlin Wall was collapsing."
As a result, the film went into preproduction before the updates could be completed and actors
Gene Hackman and
Mikhail Baryshnikov were signed onto the leading roles. Later, Hackman, exhausted from shooting three films back-to-back (''
Postcards from the Edge'', ''
Narrow Margin
''Narrow Margin'' is a 1990 American neo-noir action thriller film written and directed by Peter Hyams, loosely based on the 1952 film noir '' The Narrow Margin''. The film stars Gene Hackman and Anne Archer, with James Sikking, J. T. Walsh, ...
'', and ''
Class Action
A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class actio ...
''), tried to back out of filming two weeks before production was set to begin. Fearing a lawsuit from
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 a ...
, Hackman begrudgingly stayed on.
The title "''Company Business''" comes from the depiction in the movie of the word "company" as meaning the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
, so "company business" means operations not to be revealed to anyone outside the CIA. The
working title
A working title, which may be abbreviated and styled in trade publications after a putative title as (wt), also called a production title or a tentative title, is the temporary title of a product or project used during its development, usually ...
was ''Dinosaurs'' and the scene relating to this term was left in the finished film: a restaurant scene in which the young lady calls the two main characters "dinosaurs" meaning that CIA and
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
agents are no longer needed in the
post–Cold War era
The –Cold War era is a period of history that follows the end of the Cold War, which represents history after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. This period saw the United States became the world's sole superpower in the world and paved the way ...
. This title was dropped when it was learned that
Walt Disney Studios had already registered it.
Filming
The film was produced by frequent Nicholas Meyer collaborator
Steven-Charles Jaffe
Steven-Charles Jaffe (born 1951) is an American film producer, director, and screenwriter known for his work on such films as ''Motel Hell'' (1980), ''Near Dark'' (1987), '' Strange Days'' (1995)'','' and the Best Picture-nominated romantic ...
, who also served as second unit director. Filming took place in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
and Paris, as well as numerous locations in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
.
Meyer later described his experience on ''Company Business'', saying:
The film, which came to be known as ''Company Business'', was a catastrophe, and it was no one's fault but mine. Going forward without a finished script was suicide. And while on paper, the troika of Hackman, Baryshnikov, and Meyer might have appeared promising, in reality we were all pulling in different directions, and my bouts with Hackman just about wrecked me. ..There were a couple of sequences in ''Company Business'' of which I was proud, notably the tense spy swap sequence in the Berlin subway—but isolated sequences do not a good film make. A great movie is great from start to finish. ''Company Business'', alas, did not come close.
Reception
Box office
''Company Business'' earned $533,610 over its opening weekend, playing in 232 theaters. The film grossed $1,501,785 in North America.
Critical response
''Company Business'' was met with mixed reviews.
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...
of ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' gave the film a lukewarm review, stating, "Mr. Hackman, who has played this role before, and Mr. Baryshnikov, who hasn't, are both sturdy if a little tired. Under the direction of Mr. Meyer, who also wrote the screenplay, the film makes sense without ever being surprising." ''
Time Out'' similarly described the film as "offer
ngfamiliar spy movie clichés, and although Meyer's direction creates a moderately menacing atmosphere, his script is at best undemanding, at worst simplistic."
''
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
'' called the film a "muddled comedic-thriller" and added, "Writer-director Nicholas Meyer also is all over the map with his direction and script, which begins as a thriller (complete with portentously brooding music by
Michael Kamen
Michael Arnold Kamen (April 15, 1948 – November 18, 2003) was an American composer (especially of film scores), orchestral arranger, orchestral conductor, songwriter, and session musician.
Biography Early life
Michael Arnold Kamen was born ...
) then shifts to a sort of screwy comedy."
Michael Wilmington of the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...
'' called it "a shallow pastiche" and "a thin movie with no real center." He added:
References
External links
*
*
*
*
{{Nicholas Meyer
1991 films
1990s spy films
American spy films
Films about the Central Intelligence Agency
Films directed by Nicholas Meyer
Films produced by Steven-Charles Jaffe
Films set in the 1990s
Films set in Berlin
Films shot in Berlin
Films shot in Paris
Films shot in the United States
Films with screenplays by Nicholas Meyer
Cold War spy films
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films
Films scored by Michael Kamen
1990s English-language films
1990s American films