We did a survey of experts and came up with our list of the Ten Best Hollywood Films about Russia and Russians
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch (MGM, 1939)
In one of her most entertaining roles, Swedish-born star Greta Garbo plays a humorless Soviet commissar sent to Paris to expedite a sale of jewels formerly belonging to the Romanovs. Instead, she is seduced and converted by the city’s consumer attractions, and by a playboy Count (Melvyn Douglas). Equipped with an unending supply of anti-Communist witticisms, and that absurd hat Ninotchka at first ridicules but eventually comes to desire (see page 60), the film argues that life may not be fair under capitalism, but it is much more sexy and fun. In the Moscow scenes, Bela Lugosi fuses his Dracula persona to the character of the sinister Communist bureaucrat Razinin.
Directed by Norman Jewison (United Artists, 1966)
A product of the 1960s love-peace-movement, this madcap comedy plays upon American paranoia. When a Soviet submarine (incompetently piloted by folk singer Theodore Bikel) runs aground near a small New England town, the natives are terrified. But in no time, one of the sailors is falling in love with a local girl, and the two sides unite to save an endangered child. Much of the humor is verbal, as the sub’s lieutenant (Alan Arkin) attempts to express himself in English: “Emergency. Everybody to get from street.”
Directed by Anatole Litvak (20th Century Fox, 1956)
The most successful of the many screen versions of the apocryphal story of Tsar Nicholas’ daughter, long believed (wrongly) by many to have survived the murder of the royal family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Ingrid Bergman won her second Oscar in the title role. Yul Brynner plays an unscrupulous former Tsarist general who tutors Anastasia in the ways of the court, so that together they can claim the royal fortune. The cast also includes a formidable Helen Hayes as the long-suffering Dowager Empress, and Russian émigré actor Akim Tamiroff as Brynner’s frantic and heavily accented sidekick.
Directed by Paul Mazursky (Columbia, 1984)
Vladimir Ivanov (Robin Williams), a saxophonist in a touring Soviet circus orchestra, defects in a hilarious scene set at Bloomingdale’s. Inspired by the then recent real-life defections of Soviet performing artists (Mikhail Baryshnikov, et al), the film is an unapologetic love letter to New York, consumerism and the American way of life. It opens with an extended sequence set in Brezhnev’s Moscow, one of Hollywood’s most ambitious attempts to represent authentic Soviet life (it was actually filmed in Munich, with the help of the large Russian émigré community there). Features self-deprecating appearances by prominent Soviet émigré actors Savely Kramarov and Elya Baskin.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick (Columbia, 1963)
A viciously funny satire of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. A crazed American general launches an attack on the USSR. Playing three roles, including that of the U.S. President, Peter Sellers attempts by telephone to soothe the angry reaction of the drunken Soviet Premiere Dmitri Kissoff (!) and thereby avert disaster. Peter Bull’s performance as the smoothly devious Soviet Ambassador DeSadesky (!!) is a comic tour de force.
Directed by Josef von Sternberg (Paramount, 1934)
The best of von Sternberg’s several films on Russian subjects, and the best (although probably least accurate) of Hollywood’s many films about Tsarina Catherine the Great. Marlene Dietrich is a brilliantly manipulative monarch, presiding over a dark and violent court that bears no resemblance to St. Petersburg, but which provides many striking visuals and plenty of sexual intrigue. With an aggressive musical score derived from Tchaikovsky, this is, in von Sternberg’s words, a “relentless excursion in style.”
Directed by Warren Beatty (Paramount, 1981)
Beatty directed and starred in this admirable and often moving film biography of John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, still regarded as one of the most valuable eyewitness accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Drawing on the dynamic documentary style of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, Warren mixes politics, history and romance (with Diane Keaton as Reed’s lover, Louise Bryant) to document not only the Russian Revolution in Russia, but also its significance in the American Communist movement.
Directed by John McTiernan (Paramount, 1990)
In this glasnost-era techno thriller, Sean Connery does a neat about-face from his years of making Russians look silly as James Bond, and takes on the role of a Russian (actually, he’s a Russian-speaking Lithuanian). He is Marko Ramius, a Soviet submarine commander who decides to defect to America, along with his state-of-the art sub. The American military (led by Alec Baldwin) scrambles to accommodate Ramius without causing all-out war.
Directed by Peter Ustinov (Universal International, 1961)
Ustinov, born of Russian parents in England, directed, wrote and starred in this urbane Cold War comedy set in Concordia, a small peace-loving and neutral country caught between Soviet and American posturing. When the son (John Gavin) of the Soviet Ambassador (a “jolly but menacing-looking” Akim Tamiroff) and the daughter (Sandra Dee) of the American Ambassador fall in love, many complications ensue: “Our daughter has fallen in love with a Commie!” As Concordia’s President, Ustinov overcomes ideological hostilities to offer an escapist message that audiences desperately wanted to hear.
Directed by Woody Allen (United Artists, 1975)
Allen wrote, directed and starred in this sophisticated send-up of the conventions of nineteenth-century Russian literature (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) and Soviet film (Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, Potemkin). As Boris Grushenko, Allen (wearing his trademark and highly anachronistic glasses) accidentally helps the Russian army to defeat Napoleon, but spends most of his energy pursuing his slatternly beloved Sonya (Diane Keaton). Although the film’s scattershot humor demands a certain degree of familiarity with Russian literature and history, it makes us realize that Hollywood’s image of Russia is very much a manipulated product, not reality.
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