| Company Business | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Nicholas Meyer |
| Produced by | Steven-Charles Jaffe |
| Written by | Nicholas Meyer |
| Starring | Gene Hackman Mikhail Baryshnikov Kurtwood Smith Terry O'Quinn Daniel von Bargen Géraldine Danon |
| Music by | Michael Kamen |
| Cinematography | Gerry Fisher |
| Editing by | Ronald Roose |
| Distributed by | MGM |
| Release date(s) | September 6, 1991 |
| Running time | 99 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Company Business is a 1991 spy film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Contents |
The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman), a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin. The exchange is actually a cover for a CIA plot to use drug cartel money to buy back Benjamin Sobel (Bob Sherman), a U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union during the 1960s. The exchange goes wrong after Boyd recognizes the supposedly imprisoned Sobel as a man he saw two days before at Dulles Airport, and is subsequently told by Grushenko that it really is Sobel, who is now a KGB agent.
The two agents are forced to go on the run from both Boyd's own Company superiors (Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn) and the head of the KGB (Oleg Rudnik), who all wish to see the exchange completed for reasons that are both obvious and not so obvious. Their only hope may lie in Natasha Grimaud (Géraldine Danon), a mysterious French beauty from Grushenko's past.
The title comes from the depiction in the movie of the word “company” as meaning the CIA, so “company business” means operations not to be revealed to anyone outside the CIA. The working title was “Dinosaurs” and the scene relating to this term was left in the movie, a restaurant scene in which the young lady calls the two main characters “dinosaurs” meaning that CIA and KGB agents are no longer needed in the post cold war world. As if to emphasize this the scene features a huge dinosaur skeleton hanging from the ceiling.
Company Business was met with mixed reviews.[1]
Vincent Canby of the The New York Times gave the film a luke-warm 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."[2]
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