FEW BUSINESSES ARE AS MUCH A VALIDATION OF CAPITALISM AS THE film industry, created largely by Jewish immigrants and their sons. Moviemaking was the pinnacle of the American Dream, realizable with the right Machiavellian combination of initiative (virtù) and luck (fortuna). But during the Great Depression—especially in the early and mid-1930s—it seemed that capitalism’s potential had been exhausted. There were the one per centers and the rest, the victors and the victims: stars like Claudette Colbert, who could command $50,000 a picture, and the masses that had difficulty shelling out a quarter to see the film. William Manchester began his popular history The Glory and the Dream with a bleak picture of 1932, “the cruelest year of the Depression,” with its failing banks, burgeoning welfare rolls, foreclosure riots, bootleg coal, shoes with pasteboard soles, wedding rings sacrificed for instant cash, pawned furniture, “payless paydays” for teachers, students suffering from malnutrition, and men riding the rails in search of work. People scavenged for food in refuse dumps and garbage cans, even as farmers killed livestock that could not be sold as meat and dumped milk on the ground rather than sell it at two cents a quart when distributors charged eight.
Racist and anti-Semitic paramilitary groups—the Order of Black Shirts; the Silver Shirts, which emulated Hitler’s Brown shirts; and the Khaki Shirts or US Fascists—cast a shadow over the land, as if they were waiting in reserve for a crisis to happen. But the crisis would be a crisis of faith in an economic system that seemed to be working—until the crash. Was fascism the answer? Columbia University president and Nobel Prize winner Nicholas Murray Butler stopped short of saying so, although he extolled totalitarian regimes for producing “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character, and far more courage than the system of elections.” The situation was so extreme that Clare Boothe—before she married Henry Luce and became a well-known playwright, journalist, and ambassador—exclaimed in exasperation, “Appoint a dictator,” even though she was hardly a fascist sympathizer. “Happy Days Are Here Again” had upbeat lyrics, but these days were nowhere in sight.
Perhaps a dictatorship—at least a benevolent one—was the solution, or “share the wealth” socialism. Maybe even American-style communism, more red than white and blue. Hollywood would endorse neither fascism nor communism, both of which would have subverted the free enterprise system on which the industry was founded. Still, a wavering faith in democracy was not a topic Hollywood could ignore, any more than it could ignore the disillusionment of the veterans of the Great War. A few films of the 1930s (Wild Boys of the Road, Dead End, Heroes for Sale, even King Kong, in which out-of-work Fay Wray is discovered by a director as she filches an apple) painted a bleak canvas of the period, a striking contrast to the upbeat WPA murals that were sprouting up in public places. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), James Allen (Paul Muni), a veteran of the Great War, returns to an indifferent America and an uncertain future. An unwitting participant in a robbery, Allen is sentenced to ten years on a chain gang, from which he escapes. Essentially a decent man wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit, Allen evolves into a model citizen, and he is persuaded to return to the chain gang for nine months, after which he supposedly will be released. But the prison commission refuses to act. Allen, realizing the situation is hopeless, breaks out again, this time embarking upon a life of crime. A man who wanted only to build bridges becomes a criminal because of a corrupt system.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is not so much an indictment of the punitive system—with its “concentration-camp atmosphere,” which did not need an exposé—as it is a critique of a justice system, which is portrayed as a totalitarian bureaucracy where inmates serve as sport for sadistic wardens and guards. Road Gang (1936) went even further in its dramatization of prisoner abuse: Inmates are flogged, electrocuted on high-voltage fences, and sent off to the coalmines. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, prison is an alternative America, an ever-expanding fascist microcosm.
Allen’s plight occasions editorials with accusatory headlines: “Where Is Civilization?” and “States Rights? What Has Become of Them?” But even a sympathetic press fails to secure his release. His sentence is a fait accompli. Allen must pay for a crime he did not commit. The moral is simple: Don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you’ll end up spending a decade on a chain gang—and you’ll be lucky if you’re not put in a sweat box. Justice is blindfolded, and her scales are imbalanced.
Heroes for Sale (1933) featured another lost soul abandoned by his country. Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), a World War I vet whose heroism has gone unrecognized, returns to civilian life, where he is befriended by a luncheonette owner. Holmes is on the road to reintegration when he is accused of instigating a workers’ demonstration that has turned violent. He is sentenced to five years in prison. Upon his release, he joins the ranks of the homeless. Even after he comes into some money, he hands it over to the luncheonette owner to feed his own kind, preferring to remain a man without a country and a home. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Heroes for Sale, the protagonists pay the price for serving in the war to end all wars and making the world safe for democracy, which seems to have vanished during their absence. Each is wrongly imprisoned and is never the same afterwards.
In crime movies, prisons are rarely humane, and wardens are rarely benevolent. There are exceptions, of course: the wardens in The Criminal Code (1931), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and Crime School (1938). But portraying prisons as fascist fiefdoms with commandant wardens and their lackeys and chain gangs as a form of slave labor was not especially controversial. Moviegoers accepted the idea that in a republic that promised liberty and justice for all there was a colony known as the prison system, where liberty was suspended and justice often denied. They had become accustomed to prison-as-purgatory, in which prisoners are either purged of their sins or consumed in the process of purgation. Even in a movie from Poverty Row, PRC’s Lady in the Death House (1944), an off-screen voice turns grimly epigrammatic: “The state that cannot give life demands the right to take life.”
What was unsettling in the 1930s was the prospect of a fascist America, not a republic with a few pockets of fascism. American fascism was a subject the industry would have preferred to ignore, but it had “what if?” possibilities. The trick was to show what could happen. There would be an open-ended dénouement allowing some to believe that fascism—or at least benevolent fascism—would be acceptable if it featured a leader charismatic enough to inspire confidence, even if such a system resulted in curtailment or suspension of civil liberties in order to promote the common good. Others would regard the film as a cautionary tale, engrossing but implausible.
Gabriel over the White House (1933) qualified as both. In that film, after an automobile accident caused by reckless driving, President Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) awakens from a coma a changed man. Determined to solve America’s economic problems and rid the country of organized crime, he converts the republic into a dictatorship by dissolving Congress and imposing martial law, justifying his subversion of the Constitution by invoking the law of God as promulgated through him by the angel Gabriel. Apparently, angels were not just in the outfield, but also in the White House. Once the president accomplishes his goals—full employment, the execution of criminals, world disarmament—he peacefully expires, leaving America and the world a supposedly better place. Is the film implying that the president’s measures are temporary, remaining in force until order is restored, after which the country will revert to its old democratic self? Or that fascism is the only way of dispelling the miasma of the Great Depression? If so, the dictatorship would be permanent in case the same circumstances that brought it about should recur. The similarity between the president and the new chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, was striking. Just as Hitler dissolved the Reichstag, President Hammond dissolves Congress. Both leaders were also committed to full employment, but was fascism the only way to achieve it? In Germany, Gabriel over the White House was regarded as a “fascist satire,” with a protagonist whose policies validated Hitler’s. Reactions were mixed in the United States, with “some calling it a satire [while] others agreed with its agenda.” There is another way of interpreting the film, as a utopian fantasy reflecting the desires of the unemployed who would accept a dictatorship—benevolent or otherwise, especially one that had God’s imprimatur—if it meant they could be guaranteed jobs. Chicagoans would be thrilled to live in a gangster-free city. Pacifists would have nothing to protest against in a world committed to disarmament. It would be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy (2:1–5), with swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and nations no longer warring with each other. Eden had returned and taken root in American soil.
The President Vanishes (1934), less ambivalent but nonetheless utopian, arrived with an impressive pedigree: a script based on a Rex Stout novel; a prominent director, William Wellman; and an assistant director, Dorothy Arzner, who was establishing herself as a major filmmaker in her own right. The film was based on another fantasy premise: an isolationist president’s discovery that Americans equate isolationism with cowardice and expect him to involve the country in a war that has already started in Europe. Although the world was still five years away from war, The President Vanishes posed a real dilemma. Does national honor demand that a country become entangled in a foreign conflict to maintain its status as a super power, refusing to stand by while ignorant armies clash by night? The president, hoping to teach the people a lesson, allows himself to be kidnapped by the Grey Shirts, obviously modeled after William Pelley’s Silver Shirts. The president narrowly escapes getting murdered and, once freed, continues preaching the gospel of non-intervention, which was pretty much the status quo in America until the country was awakened from its lethargy on 7 December 1941. The President Vanishes is notable for its subtle conjunction of war and munitions manufacturers, who depend on wars to remain in business. At a banquet hosted by a lobbyist for a quintet of warmongers, the lobbyist’s wife (Rosalind Russell) compares the group to a flock of birds. When one of them asks what kind, Russell, with her signature disdain, replies, “Eagles.” It was a drawing room comedy exit line, delivered by an actress who had few peers when it came to acidic line readings. All The President Vanishes could do was jolt the complacent into accepting—or at least understanding—the issues: the folly of believing that war is the only way of validating a country’s honor; isolationism as the only way of avoiding a repeat of World War I; and munitions plants as the only defense against war. That each canceled the others out seemed unimportant. America could at least encase itself in the cocoon of isolationism for a few more years.
It was a confused—and confusing—era. The end seemed to justify the means. If a United States president could take the law into his hands, why not the youth of America? In Cecil B. De Mille’s This Day and Age (1933), a band of civic-minded youths, frustrated by their elders’ inability to prosecute a notorious gangster, decide to kidnap him, bring him to a brickyard, and lower him into a rat-infested pit to provoke a confession. The only charge brought against them is car theft (a female accomplice commandeered the automobile to summon the police). But whatever time the young vigilantes might serve will be spent in surroundings considerably more comfortable than those in which Allen and Holmes found themselves. The kids benefited the community by breaking the law, and their offense is treated like a minor infraction. Paul Muni’s Allen and Richard Barthelmess’s Holmes merely served their country.
In the films of the thirties, communism was pictured more as a nuisance than a threat. When communists weren’t spouting the party line, they were mouthing clichés. The parasitic Carlo (Mischa Auer) in My Man Godfrey (1936) inveighs against money, “the Frankenstein monster that devours souls,” but thinks nothing of sponging off his rich patrons. Two films dating from around the same time, Our Daily Bread (1934) and Red Salute (1936), addressed communism differently: the former by preaching collectivism; the latter, by lampooning campus radicalism. Our Daily Bread steered clear of ideology. There was no dialectic in the story of a husband without prospects and a wife with an uncle who offers the couple a farm in the appropriately named community of Arcadia. The farm swells into a cooperative, whose philosophy, in the vernacular, is “You help me, I help you. We help ourselves by helping others.” This attitude, unlike Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” is never expressed ideologically, although it amounts to the same thing. The rationale behind the cooperative harks back to Plato’s theory of the origins of society in Book 2 of The Republic: No one is self-sufficient, but all are co-dependent, relying on the skills and talents of others. In Our Daily Bread, a mason has trouble putting up the frame for a house, while a carpenter is similarly frustrated by his inability to lay a foundation. Once they realize each has a skill the other lacks, they exchange places, and the house gets built. The incident illustrates the principle of division and specialization of labor, the only way in which the farm can grow and thrive. When the husband first questions the men about their abilities, he is more favorably disposed towards farmers, carpenters, masons, plumbers, bricklayers, and tailors than towards the lone violinist, who nonetheless is welcomed into a community from which no one is excluded, including a potential home wrecker (Barbara Pepper at her blowziest).
When the issue of self-determination arises, the members argue about what form of government they should adopt. Someone suggests democracy and is roundly booed: “That kind of talk got us here in the first place.” Another proposes socialism, which would make sense in a collective, except that depicting the farm as a socialist enclave would have alienated moviegoers who could accept a community where people helped each other, but not one founded on an “ism” that many considered a diluted form of communism and no less inimical to free enterprise. Politically, the commune will be an anomaly: a democratic collective founded on group effort. A salt-of-the-earth type (the wonderful character actor, John Qualen) admits his ignorance of “isms,” but is clear about what is needed: “a big boss”—namely, the husband, “the FDR of Arcadia,” as Andrew Bergman dubbed him.
Our Daily Bread glorified collectivism at a time when similar measures enacted by the Soviet government led to famine in Ukraine, implying that the experiment that caused more than seven million people to die of starvation in the Soviet Union could succeed in the United States, where cooperative farming is a choice, not a mandate. The Arcadian farm was not a footnote to President Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was a new deal proposed and ratified by the people, not the government, a cooperative venture entered into freely—a distinction that makes all the difference between a social contract and formal legislation. Our Daily Bread, however, glossed over the downside of collectivism, the weakening of the competitive spirit. If everyone works for the good of the community, every individual’s talents are subsumed into the mass, with a corresponding loss of individuality and recognition. Collectivism—at least in America—is utopianism. Individuals may be willing to suppress the competitive instinct temporarily, but human nature will out. Pure communism, in which the individual subordinates him- or herself to a higher authority, is possible in religious communities where the higher good is divinely sanctioned. But after a time, even fervent believers have been known to defect. The selfless life is for saints who may realize they are superior to some of their peers, but who still choose to lay their talents on a communal altar.
The cooperative efforts are vindicated in the dizzying climax when the men form a pick and shovel brigade to dig an irrigation ditch. Director King Vidor timed their movements to the beat of a metronome: “The picks came down on the counts of one and three, the shovels scooped dirt on count two and tossed it on count four.” Vidor was actually following Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of rhythmic montage, in which a metrical pattern is imposed on the shots, with each succeeding the other like notes in a musical score. With drought no longer an issue, Arcadia looks as if it were blessed from above. Like the Greek pastoral with its Arcadian setting, Our Daily Bread partook of the purity of myth without providing the substance of reality.
Red Salute (1935), on the other hand, was moored in reality—specifically, in the 1930s college scene. The typical 1930s college movie was a musical (College Humor [1933], College Rhythm [1934], Collegiate [1936], College Swing [1938]), depicting campus life as a pre-hookup oasis where academics took a back seat to athletics and romance. Red Salute, however, portrayed college—in this case, one situated in the nation’s capital—as a haven for left-wing activists. Informed audiences would not have been surprised that college students, unable to find a satisfactory explanation for the Great Depression, looked to the Left for answers, which it gladly supplied. Excessive speculation in the stock market on the part of the wealthy was to blame. This scenario, the Left indicated, would not have occurred under socialism, where the means of production are government-owned. Although campus radicalism in the 1930s was not as widespread as it was during the Vietnam War, leftist college organizations did exist, such as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), an offshoot of Upton Sinclair’s Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the inspiration for the film’s Liberty League—International Students. The latter was a clever title, implying that the malcontents were not Americans, but foreigners intent on imposing an alien sociopolitical “ism” on the United States.
However, one need not worry. Red Salute was a politicized screwball comedy that opened with a student proclaiming at a campus rally, “The world’s sick, and you’re going to pay the doctor’s bills.” Unsurprisingly, the announcement is greeted with laughter. The audience consists of red-blooded Americans, while the demagogue is just a Red—and an exchange student at that. A general’s daughter (Barbara Stanwyck), enamored of the firebrand and his “ism,” refuses to accept her father’s arguments about the good life she has enjoyed under capitalism. The father retaliates by shipping his daughter off to Mexico, where she encounters a brash American soldier (Robert Young). Once they discover each other’s politics, he dubs her “Red”; she responds by christening him “Uncle Sam.”
To avoid paying a bar bill, Red and Uncle Sam hit the road, like Ellie Andrews and Peter Warne in It Happened One Night (1934). In the course of their odyssey, there is a stopover at a cornfield (compare the haystack in It Happened One Night) and a genial kidnapping that provides them with a trailer (see the motor court in It Happened One Night). The couple arrive in Washington, DC, in time for May Day and the agitator’s rabble-rousing speech about the need to replace the old order with an import from abroad (country unspecified). Uncle Sam counters with his own speech, addressing everyone as “comrade.” His intentionally provocative offer to tear down the American flag leads to a melee. Capitalism has triumphed, the student radical is deported, and Red and Uncle Sam spend their honeymoon in the trailer, a more intimate space than the motor court to which Ellie and Peter return at the end of It Happened One Night.
Soak the Rich (1936) took a more satiric approach to college radicalism, much sharper than Red Salute, as one might expect from the screenwriting team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Soak the Rich anticipated James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s play, The Male Animal, filmed in 1942, in which a college professor champions academic freedom at a conservative institution from which instructors suspected of being communists have been fired. In Soak the Rich, a professor’s endorsement of a “soak the rich” program—inspired by the 1935 Revenue Act known as the “soak the rich” tax, which imposed a higher income tax on anyone making over $5 million—galvanizes a campus. Capitalism is victorious, although the writers’ sympathies seemed to lie with the supporters of the tax, depicted as youths finding their way into adulthood. Anyone expecting a tidy resolution was disappointed. Student radicals often grow up to become capitalists, and then all’s right with the world—but only in the movies. In 1936, seven million Americans were still out of work. The rich—particularly the “rich rich,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized them—experienced a slight drizzle, while dust storms continued to plague Oklahoma, civil war erupted in Spain, and Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, breaking the Treaty of Versailles. The world was three years away from war, having been given a prevue of coming attractions in Spain, where civil war was being waged. The Loyalists, abetted by the Soviet Union, hoped to establish a republican form of government more socialist than democratic, while the Nationalists, aided by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, were determined to keep the country under the control of the military and the church, so Spain could become a malleable ally. The Nationalist victory in 1939 did not augur well for the western democracies, particularly after Hitler invaded Poland in September of that year.
For Hollywood, 1939 had a different significance. An industry that had earlier avoided offending Nazi Germany now realized it had nothing to lose. There was no hope of reconciliation with a nation determined to deracinate the stock from which most of the studio founders had come. It was time to address German anti-Semitism, which gave every indication of leading to a pogrom far worse than anything Jews had experienced previously. Hollywood’s degree of daring can be seen in two 1939 films, one from Poverty Row, the other from one of the Big Five, Warner Bros. In October 1939, Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC), the forerunner of Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), planned to release its exploitation film, Hitler, Beast of Berlin. But PDC encountered opposition from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which declined to give the film a Production Code seal, citing violation of article 10 (national feelings) of the Motion Picture Production Code: “The history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly.” Hitler was certainly a prominent person, and Germany was not a belligerent, at least not to the United States at the time. The title was then changed to Beasts of Berlin (a.k.a. Goose Step and Hell’s Devils). Despite the opening disclaimer that it was free of “hatred, prejudice or bias to any class,” Beasts of Berlin did not flinch from showing a concentration camp, where Jews, Catholics, Social Democrats, and communists were interned, brutalized, and humiliated. A Jewish inmate is forced to say “I am swine,” and a priest is stripped of his cassock. Beasts of Berlin may seem like a curio, but it remains a shocking exposé of the inhumanity of the Third Reich at a time when the German-American Bund under Fritz Kuhn was able to attract an audience of twenty thousand to New York’s Madison Square Garden where, in February 1939, Kuhn denounced the New Deal as a “Jew Deal.” There were enough anti-Semites in America to cause any studio to wonder about the advisability of releasing an anti-Nazi movie that year.
Since Warner Bros. had been barred from the German market in 1934, the studio’s primary concern about Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) was how American audiences would react. The film’s production history has been well documented. Briefly, in June 1938, Warner Bros. bought the rights to a New York Post series, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” which concerned German espionage in the United States. What could have been an explosive revelation was defused by a jittery White House, which had already been infiltrated and preferred that the public not know as much. The studio feared a libel suit if the spies’ names were used, even though they had been indicted, and death threats caused producer Robert Lord to arm himself with a revolver. The project also aroused the ire of the German consul, Georg Gyssling, and the German-American Bund. When the smoke cleared, what remained was a rough-edged semi-documentary, nothing as engrossing as Fox’s Boomerang (1947) and Call Northside 777 (1948). Although Confessions of a Nazi Spy did not generate big box office, it had the distinction of being the first film made by a major studio that alerted Americans to the existence of Hitler Youth-style camps in the United States, where children learned to honor the Führer; to the continual threat of espionage; and to the racist German-American Bund. In 1939, with newsreels, Beasts of Berlin (under whatever title one saw it), and Confessions of a Nazi Spy, no moviegoer could claim ignorance of a movement that was casting an ever-widening net over Europe and a pall over America.
Neither film, however, was part of that annus celestis, 1939, in which more classics were released than ever before: The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Wuthering Heights, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Young Mr. Lincoln, Gunga Din, and of course, Gone with the Wind. Plus Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka.
While communism was eminently suited to satire and screwball comedy, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett believed it could also work as romantic comedy—deliciously satiric and mildly screwball—without detracting from the basic story line. Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) is transformed from humorless Stalinist to amorous woman, wooed by the playboy Count Leon (Melvyn Douglas) and seduced by capitalism, Parisian style. Ninotchka first appears as a literal-minded, unsmiling envoy extraordinary, dispatched to Paris to check on the three Bolsheviks who had been sent there to sell a collection of jewels confiscated after the Revolution. Meanwhile, the comrades have discovered that capitalism can supply them with luxuries unheard of in Moscow. After Ninotchka encounters Count Leon, who breaks down her defenses, she grows increasingly feminine, as only Garbo can, becoming the incarnation of the anima, the feminine principle, and imbuing it with a rarefied sensuousness. It was as if her body had departed to another world, leaving behind the essence of the eternal feminine. Leon woos her with images from nature—snails encircling each other, flowers opening their petals—and then delicately presses his lips against hers. Previously, she had accused him of being talkative. After the kiss, Leon asks, “Was that talkative?” to which Ninotchka replies, “No. That was restful. Again.” She is now a capitalist in the making. Communists do not kiss like Leon.
Once Ninotchka discovers the transformative power of fashion—from hats to lingerie—and the liberating effects of champagne, she turns girlish, as if she were experiencing first love retroactively. Garbo’s characteristic look of yearning suggests that the transformation is nearing completion. She cannot slough off the skin of capitalism even after returning to Moscow. But Leon has a way of extricating her from a way of life in which she no longer believes. As often happens when the male controls the narrative, Leon arranges for Ninotchka’s return to Paris, then threatens to embark upon a personal crusade to convert Russians everywhere into capitalists unless she remains in Paris with him. But Ninotchka can play this game, too. Slyly (and Garbo is at her most sphinxlike in the fade-out), she acquiesces—for the good of her country: “No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian.”
Brackett and Wilder prick the inflated balloon of communism without causing it to burst. Wit trumped politics. When Ninotchka visits a working class bistro and orders raw carrots and beets, the shocked waiter responds, “This is a restaurant, not a meadow.” The team knew how far they could go with “comrade” and “little father” and references to show trials and tractor shortages. The focus is on Ninotchka’s capitalist flowering—and with Garbo undergoing the process, the flower emerges in full bloom.
Nonetheless, there is an air of sadness about Ninotchka, which premiered a month after World War II erupted in Europe, eventually darkening the city of lights. The opening title suggested as much, asking the audience to recall a time “when a siren was a brunette, and not an alarm—and if a Frenchman turned off the light, it was not because of an air raid.” Ninotchka was a temporary farewell to prewar Paris, where discretion was the better part of infidelity, and a boudoir was not always a bedchamber.
Once the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a short-lived nonaggression pact on 23 August 1939, a mere nine days before Hitler invaded Poland, communism was no longer an aberration from which a woman is wooed, but one from which she must be rescued. MGM intended Comrade X (1940) to be the companion piece to Ninotchka. Like the earlier film, it originated as a story by Walter Reisch, which Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer converted into a screenplay that was more vodka than champagne. Wit, for the most part, was absent. In its place, spiky dialogue—not sharp enough to cut, but only prick—left a droplet of blood. In 1940, only Stalinists would have questioned the film’s equation of communism with totalitarianism and its portrayal of the Soviet Union as deceitful and xenophobic.
In the opening scene, an American journalist in Moscow (Eve Arden) grumbles about censorship and duplicity, envisioning a time when the press will be “blindfolded and led around by seeing eye dogs.” To her, the Kremlin is a corporation of “stuffed shirts, double crossing the masses,” who someday “will take it apart brick by brick.” Her prediction came to pass half a century later, when the system, internally corrupt and increasingly dysfunctional, imploded without the need for dismantling.
Comrade X is an uneasy mix of hammer-heavy melodrama, anemic romance (which is surprising with Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr playing the leads), and a rescue operation with the wackiness of a silent movie car chase—this time with tanks. Anti-Soviet stories by “Comrade X,” the nom de plume of newspaper reporter McKinley Thompson (Gable), have so outraged the Kremlin that all members of the foreign press have been forbidden to leave Moscow until “Comrade X” is unmasked. Hecht and Lederer resurrected Gable’s scoop-hungry reporter from It Happened One Night, changed his name, and dispatched him to Moscow. As Peter Warne, Gable had an easier time; all he had to do in It Happened One Night was accompany a runaway heiress from Miami to New York. Here, in addition to romancing Golubka (Lamarr), a communist “motor man” working under the name of Theodore because only males can operate streetcars, Thompson must also bring her and her father, Vanya (Felix Bressart), to America. Thompson commandeers a tank that the versatile Golubka can drive—and which, for plot-resolving reasons, can he, too. The tank sequence is the film’s highlight. Thompson’s tank had been chosen to spearhead a maneuver with other tanks following in formation, as if playing follow-the-leader. Ironically, the leader is an American bringing two Russians to freedom. The trio’s arrival in Romania climaxes in a jubilant finale consisting of a newspaper headline (“Russia Invades Romania”) and a shot of Thompson, Golubka, and Vanya at Ebbets Field, watching the Dodgers play the Red Sox. Golubka roots for the home team, while Vanya despairs of understanding the great American pastime.
Satire and romance were delicately intertwined in Ninotchka like strands of gossamer strong enough to keep the film airborne. In Comrade X, satire and romance square off like fighters, and conflicting ideologies erupt in a literal battle of the sexes with Thompson and “Theodore” going at each other as if they were in the ring, each obsessed with winning a round for his or her side. Garbo succumbed to Douglas’s wooing. Gable does not woo Lamarr; instead, he imposes himself on her. Unfortunately, Hecht and Lederer expected Lamarr to evoke Garbo when Gable’s masterful virility gets the better of her. Convinced that her capitalist suitor has a soul, she admits he has a strange effect on her and promptly kisses him. In Ninotchka, Douglas planted the kiss, and Garbo demanded an encore. Director King Vidor aimed for an easy “ah” from the audience; Lubitsch preferred a knowing sigh.
So much of the film is taken up with simplistic explanations of communism and its many inconsistencies. Vanya tells Thompson that his daughter’s unswerving commitment to the party could lead to her death. Communists are expected to have ideas, he explains, but anyone who has them is eventually killed, since only the government’s ideas matter. The most damning criticism of communism is the process of succession through elimination, when a would-be head of the secret police meets with an “unfortunate accident,” allowing his rival to succeed him until it is his time for a similar accident. Golubka and her father had great hopes for Commissar Bastakoff, an intellectual far superior to the Kremlin apparatchiks. Yet this poet of the revolution will stop at nothing to stay in power, even killing his own supporters to assert his authority. At least Hecht and Lederer caught the fraudulence within the system, in which “comrade” is a meaningless form of address, and dissent is punishable by imprisonment or death by disappearance.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the scenario changed. Hollywood had to think differently about Russia, particularly after 7 December 1941, when the Soviet Union became an ally. Like the non-aggression pact, the alliance was short-lived, but it lasted long enough for Hollywood to glorify Russia at the same time it was demonizing Germany.
Just as the first movie about Pearl Harbor, Republic’s Remember Pearl Harbor (1942), was produced by a Poverty Row studio, the first film about our newest ally was PRC’s Miss V from Moscow (1942). Immediately after the Japanese attack, Republic rushed Remember Pearl Harbor into production, so that it was ready for a May 1942 release. Except for the climax, in which a playboy private redeems himself by flying, kamikaze style, into a Japanese machine gun nest—screaming “Remember Pearl Harbor, you yellow rats”—the film had nothing to do with 7 December, but instead concentrated on fifth columnists in the Philippines on the eve of the attack. Remember Pearl Harbor has the dubious distinction of introducing the yellow peril dialogue that became characteristic of World War II movies (“If you see any Japs, don’t shoot until you see the yellow of their eyes.”).
Miss V from Moscow (1942), which reached the screen five months after Remember Pearl Harbor, starred a blank-faced Lola Lane in the title role as a Soviet agent who happens to be a ringer for a German spy. Ever loyal to the homeland, Miss V is dispatched to Paris, where she masquerades as the spy, convincing some but not others. The skeptics are destined for plot limbo so Miss V can continue her undercover work, transmitting messages to Moscow about American convoy ships en route to the Soviet Union in danger of being torpedoed by Nazi submarines.
Superficially, Miss V from Moscow is pro-Russian, yet apart from the opening scene, in which the heroine agrees to assume the identity of the spy, most of the action takes place in occupied Paris, making it a different kind of anti-Nazi film. Here, a Russian patriot risks her life to aid her country by working with the French Resistance to speed American aid to the Soviet Union. Miss V embodies the true spirit of allied cooperation: She serves Russia, France, and—indirectly—America. She is her own tricolor.
Despite Lane’s indifferent performance, there is enough suspense in this sixty-five minute programmer to warrant a look, as Miss V roams around Paris, leaving a two-franc piece as her calling card for members of the Resistance and encoding information on specially treated handkerchiefs. The ending must have generated cheers in some quarters. The execution of a German officer, who had been infatuated with Miss V, is followed by a close-up of Lane wearing a peasant dress and a screen-filling smile on a hay wagon with the American soldier she had saved—although what he is doing on a hayride in the USSR is never explained. If the final shot was meant as a sign of coalescence, Lane was about as Russian as a saloon singer from Brooklyn. But 1942 was not a time to question relations between the US and the USSR. Miss V from Moscow is the first of a series of films, epitomized by Casablanca, in which the French Resistance was portrayed as having far more members than it actually did. One gets the impression that half of Paris worked for the underground. Since America had barely recovered from Pearl Harbor when Miss V from Moscow was released, the myth made the reality easier to bear. It was good for morale and better for the box office.