WATCHING Gorky Park is like taking a long walk though an endless forest on a cold wintry day as the snow and ice-leaden branches slap our faces. Based on the superb spy thriller by Martin Cruz Smith, this film hypnotizes us with its briskly paced plot, providing a whirl-wind tour of Moscow, snow-covered country estates, and Russian espionage organizations. The novel Gorky Park rivals John Le Carre's Smiley's People and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with a systematic, psychological unravelling of a bizarre mystery. Like Robert Ludlum's intricate tales, including Parsifal Mosaic, each minute the hero faces some new opposition to his quest for eclipsing the top-level "mole." This movie captures the cold tenseness central to Smith's book, mirroring the rivetting story of Russian policeman Arkady Renko's struggle to solve three seemingly inexplicable murders. Renko, like George Smiley, is an underdog, and during his exhausting investigation he must confront the KGB, international entrepreneurs, a beautiful rebel, and traitors within his own ranks.

Gorky Park keeps us on the edge or our seats for two hours as we watch Renko, played by William Hurt, solve the murders of three people in the center of Moscow, with their faces brutally carved off to erase their identities. The movie is very faithful to the book and depicts the complex plot convincingly, leaving out only the subtle intricacies that a book must describe successfully and changing the last scenes from New York to Stockholm.

Renko is no simple good guy, but rather on ordinary Russian militia policeman who becomes a scapegoat for solving the murders, which reek of corruption and international extortion. Hurt portrays Renko as an apathetic officer who agrees to work on the case only until the KGB will take it away from him. But as he begins to piece together the lives of the victims, Renko becomes caught in the middle, realizing that if he solves the case, he will most like be murdered himself, but remaining reluctant to separate himself from the case's fascinating details.

Hurt's Renko is spectacular, conveying his character's growing excitement with the murder through his increasingly sparkling eyes and his willingness to use illegal methods for exposing the corruption and violence used by his opponents. At the beginning. Hurt's Renko seems to amble through his investigation, but gradually he awakens to the vastness of the mystery, during which he falls desperately in love with one of the people involved in the murders. His splendid performance makes the movie glide off the screen, depicting the repressive, empty life a Russian might live.

DELIVERING equally powerful performances are Lee Marvin as the cold-hearted, vicious American John Osborn, who comes to Russia to buy sables and falls lustfully in love with Irina, played by stunning newcomer Joanna Pacula. Resembling Natassia Kinski with her East European sultry good looks, Pacula proves as good an actress as she is beautiful. Irina, a young Siberian woman who desperately wants to leave Russia, was friends with the three murdered victims. Pacula inculcates a quiet desperation in her Irina, who against her will falls in love with the inquisitive Renko. She monopolizes the screen with her strikingly passionate Irina, and the love scene with Hurt stuns us with its erotic passion.

Besides a superb cast, Gorky Park is blessed with stunning photography that probes the character's faces from all angles and conveys the brutal coldness of the Russian weather. Gorky Park is an internal Russian spy thriller, with Russians pitted against other Russians with the exception of the greedy Osborn. The movie presents a realistic conception of Russian life, with lines for food, crowded bars, simple homes and huge pictures of Lenin covering buildings. Russians are not stereotyped but depicted as ordinary people trying to survive in tightly controlled life styles. The ordinary scenes of Russian life are the natural home for characters like Renko, whose apartment is frugally furnished and whose office reeks of sweat and cigarette smoke.

Panoramic views of the Russian landscape and gorgeous country estates stun our eyes with crystalline grandeur. The sections of the movie set in a luxurious health spa where bureaucrats take siestas resemble the decadence of Roman orgies. Gorky Park delves into all levels of Russian society, revealing their hidden characters as Renko uncovers latent horrors.

Gorky Park combines Smith's psychological intensity and volatile episodic plot into one of the best spy films in many years. The deeper Renko gets into the mystery, the deeper we are plunged into the Russian culture and society. Not only is the movie a grand adaptation of smith's novel, but it also has a uniqueness of its own, making the characters and scenes into living forms whose smokey breath in the cold air chills us, propelling the story to its dramatic, yet plausible, end.