Now I’m ready to vote for the booby prize: I have seen “Mission to Moscow.” Before the movie starts Ambassador Joseph E. Davies says, “There was so much confusion and prejudice about Russia that I felt it was my duty to tell the truth about the Soviet Union as I saw it.” Any truth that has ever been told about Russia heretofore now has this obstacle to face. We didn’t deserve that Mr. Davies should have met the Warner Brothers.
At no point does this truth about the Soviet Union show what communism is as an ideology, a way of living, what victory in this war would mean to it and to those of us who are allied to it. The movie can only condemn fascists because they gobble up neighboring territories and make soldiers of their children. This is a peculiar picture, because it makes no effort to have you understand the things it talks about. Its two revelations about Russian communism are that Soviet women use cosmetics and that Soviet workers get paid extra for extra work—hurrah for the Revolution! Nowhere do you get any idea of Russians who refuse to be conquered either by Hitler or by purges, and one of the most ingenious oddities of the film is that it can make one-sixth of the earth’s surface seem like a cranny at Warner Brothers’. Not one character emerges. The faces are expensive, finicky duplicates of famous faces and still not any good (not nearly so good as Madame Tussaud’s). The only character who comes off at all is Oscar Homolka’s Litvinov, and that as potently as a characterization of Babe Ruth would if it barely got across the idea that he played baseball. The ideas the characters mouth are banal, unlikely and crude.
There are many interpretations, right, left and indifferent, as of the period of 1937–38 in Russia, which were two years of the purges and the Moscow trials. It’s indicative of this movie that for the history of the period it makes up its own facts. For instance, “Mission to Moscow” says that on his way to Russia for the first time Mr. Davies presented Roosevelt’s disarmament plan to Schacht, whereas this actually took place much later. It crams what were four main trials into one trial at which there is the preposterous spectacle of Radek, Bukharin, Yagoda and Tukhachevsky confessing cheek by jowl. The illusion created is that the bloodiest purge in the history of man consisted of one trial at which sixteen men were convicted. It has Krestinsky, at the trial of Radek and Pvatakov, accused as their go-between with Trotsky, replacing the actually accused Romm, possibly because Davies interceded in Romm’s behalf—take it easy, Mr. Dewey. So you have the police chief (Yagoda) being convicted at the trial for which he had produced the evidence; the general (Tukhachevsky) who was arrested, tried secretly and shot within forty-eight hours, telling the world and Mr. Davies about his crimes; and the main thing all of these men were tried for—the assassination of Kirov—not mentioned. The movie’s reason for all this distortion is to prove that the trials, terror and bloodletting were entirely a fifth-column plot among Trotskyites, Germany and Japan: Davies wrote in his book in 1941, “None of us in Russia in 1937–38 were thinking in terms of fifth-column activities. All of us paid comparatively little attention to that side of these cases.”
Mr. Davies’ book was a stale, innocuous melange of the fewest and most obvious facts that Soviet interpreters, left, right and center, had been reporting on Russia for years. Its perceptions were on a level with a Fitzgerald travelogue: everyone was “attractive and a fine type of,” everything in Moscow was beautiful, old. I mention this because the movie fights continuously and always to its death to make Davies out a major-league prophet in a minor-league world. There wasn’t an event of the years 1937–42 that Davies didn’t predict, understand or analyze for the world, while around him everything was intrigue, doubt and confusion. It manages to do this at the same time it perpetuates the appalling caricature of “naïve American abroad.” Those wonderful types of ambassadors—Lord Chilston, Shigemitsu, Coulondre, Grzybowski—that Davies found, and wrote about in his book, he finds in the movie are wasting their time at billiards and misinterpreting everything.
The movie, as a movie, is the dullest imaginable. The extent of its device is to have Davies talk or be talked to. There is a prologue five minutes long, pompous and queasy, in which the real Davies explains his motives in writing his book and authorizing the movie; the first incident of the movie itself is the identical situation, but now with the Huston-Davies explaining his motives for, etc. The mechanisms are as redundant throughout. To describe Davies’ tour of Russian heavy industry, one device is used five times without break—Davies talking to a mechanic, a coal miner, an engineer, a farmer—until you expect a flashback to the October Revolution and Davies talking to Lenin (obviously like this: “Just what do you think of your chances, Mr. Lenin? I’m a capitalist myself. . . .”). President Roosevelt chats at his desk with Davies as though he were trying to make himself heard over the uproar in the Yankee Stadium. The movie is even incapable of expressing the wonder and excitement of Russian singing and dancing, something which should be about as easy as falling off a log. Perhaps worst of all is to see the Warners, in need of a Polish figure, asking themselves what Pole Americans know; that is why you will learn in “Mission to Moscow” that Paderewsky was the Pole to see about peace in 1938.
This mishmash is directly and firmly in the tradition of Hollywood politics. A while ago it was Red-baiting, now it is Red-praising in the same sense—ignorantly. To a democratic intelligence it is repulsive and insulting.
May 10, 1943