Night Flight from Moscow (French: Le Serpent), also known as The Serpent,[1][2] is a 1973 Cold War spy thriller film produced, co-written and directed by Henri Verneuil and starring Yul Brynner, Henry Fonda, Dirk Bogarde, Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet.
Aleksey Teodorovic Vlassov, a high-ranking KGB official who defects while he is in France, possesses highly classified information as part of a deal with Western intelligence for his arrival in the United States.
The CIA discovers that a defection photo of Vlassov had been taken in the Soviet Union, not in Turkey, because of the contours of Mount Ararat in the background.
Time Out called it "a very traditional spy fable" and stated, "The only thing that sets this film apart is the totally consistent layer of impenetrable gloss with which Verneuil covers it, and his general directorial tricksiness, which runs the gamut from the irrelevant to the pretentious and back.
"[2] A contemporary review by Tony Mastroianni in the Cleveland Press stated that the film demonstrated how in 1973, the computer had replaced the dagger in espionage.