Imagining the Enemy

Russians in American Movies 

In the 2006 James Bond film, Casino Royale, Bond’s plainspoken boss M (played by a resplendent Judi Dench) is so perplexed by the post-Communist world order that she wistfully complains: “God, I miss the Cold War.” Not only for M, but also for Hollywood producers, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 created new challenges and uncertainties. Because for decades – and especially since the end of World War II – Russia (aka the USSR) had furnished Hollywood studios with an unending supply of baddies. Yet, after the disappearance of the black-and-white, good buy/bad guy world of Communism vs. Capitalism, it was less clear how one should represent Russia on screen. 

Russia and Russians have played a highly visible role in Hollywood since the early days of the film industry. This should come as no surprise, considering that Russia and/or the USSR was the primary “other” in the American consciousness for most of the twentieth century. Russia was our chief ideological and military enemy, with vast and terrifying resources – by the middle of the century capable and allegedly desirous of blowing us all off the planet. It is also a most curious historical coincidence that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (which led to the establishment of the world’s first socialist society, one of whose avowed goals was to overthrow world capitalism, headquartered in the U.S.) occurred precisely at the moment when the American film industry was entering a rapid period of development, moving from New York to Hollywood (i.e. farther from Russia), with the palm-lined avenues of Los Angeles leading to even more abstract views of the East.

 The overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the creation of the USSR was one of the biggest and most shocking stories of the century, so it makes sense that films about Russia constituted a significant part of the output of Hollywood studios from the very beginning of their existence. The increasing importance of the Soviet-American relationship, especially after World War II, and its centrality in American foreign policy, ensured that films about Russia would continue to occupy a privileged position in Hollywood production, given the studios’ need to make movies of a topical nature. Not surprisingly, many of these feature films about Russia (Ninotchka, Jet Pilot, Silk Stockings, Moscow on the Hudson) engaged in a vigorous (and sometimes humorous) defense of capitalism. Who were the men who ran the Hollywood studios, after all, but some of the most successful capitalists that the system had ever produced?

Further complicating and enriching this phenomenon was the presence in the Hollywood film industry from its earliest days of a large number of émigrés from both pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia. Some were anti-Soviet and some were pro-Soviet in their ideological leanings, yet together they participated (as directors, actors, composers, writers, designers, cameramen) in the making of many of the films that presented Russia and the USSR to the American audience [see Russian Life, Dec/Jan 1999]. These Russians also worked, of course, on many other films that did not deal with Russia, joining other émigrés (from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, England, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on) in the amazing ethnic melting pot that Hollywood became. 

hollywood films featuring Russians appeared in a wide variety of genres. From the earliest days of Hollywood, a favorite theme was the tragic fate of the Russian aristocrats who had been displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution. Especially seductive was the dramatic story of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the last Romanovs to rule Russia, who were brutally executed in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg in July, 1918. Their glamorous and doomed lives, and their involvement with Grigory Rasputin, the monk who – because of his apparent abilities to ease the suffering experienced by their hemophiliac son and heir Alexei – gained unprecedented personal access to Empress Alexandra, provided ample material for numerous screenplays. In nearly all of them, the Romanovs, including Tsar Nicholas II, are portrayed in a highly romanticized fashion, mourned as victims of the Revolution rather than criticized for their ineffectual, passive and irresponsible leadership. 

The extremely sympathetic portrayal of the Romanovs in many of these films reflected American hostility towards the newly created Bolshevik regime, whose stated goal was to destroy capitalism. Also stressed in most of the American films made about the Romanovs is their piety, in contrast to the anti-religious savagery of their persecutors. Among the best examples of the Romanov/Rasputin films is Rasputin and the Empress, released in 1932, and starring all three of the Barrymores (John, Ethel and Lionel) in their only screen appearance together. Another is Nicholas and Alexandra. An earlier Romanov – the vivacious, brilliant and sexually adventurous Catherine the Great – also attracted producers and directors, including the German émigré Josef von Sternberg, who cast Marlene Dietrich in the highly stylized The Scarlet Empress.

But the most productive of the Romanov tales was that of Anastasia, one of the daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra, who according to persistent rumors had miraculously survived the basement assassination and escaped Russia in disguise. Numerous women claiming to be Anastasia surfaced in Europe and America, including one particularly convincing imposter, Anna Anderson, who even persuaded surviving members of the Romanov family of her authenticity. Only the rise of glasnost in the USSR and the collapse of Communism in 1991 finally made it possible to prove conclusively that Anastasia (and all the other family members) had in fact died in Yekaterinburg.

During the decades before this proof was established (and even afterwards), the character of Anastasia, and her supposed survival and subsequent life, inspired scores of fictional tales, in the form of stories, novels, plays and films. The Anastasia story was especially appealing to American audiences, who as democrats both derided and envied the tradition of aristocracy that was the foundation of European societies. In the Anastasia narrative also reside strong elements of the Cinderella rags-to-riches story, one of the most enduring and productive of all fictional narratives. Anastasia’s search for identity represents a universal quest for belonging to which audiences can easily respond. Probably the most accomplished of the numerous films about Anastasia (including a very popular animated Disney version released in 1997 that makes no attempt whatsoever to incorporate historical truth) was Anastasia (1956), starring Ingrid Bergman in the title role. Not coincidentally, its plot bears a strong resemblance to the musical My Fair Lady, which opened on Broadway the same year.

over the twentieth century, changes in relations between the U.S. and the USSR registered very quickly on screen. During the 1930s, in the wake of the Depression, there was increased American interest in Communism as a realistic economic alternative to capitalism. Numerous attempts were made by leading Hollywood producers to make feature films about American engineers working in the Soviet Union on the vast new construction projects that were part of the first Five-Year Plans. None were ever completed, however, mainly because of uncertainty over how they would be received by the American audience.

During World War II, Hollywood’s portrayal of the USSR underwent a complete transformation. Once the U.S. and the Soviet Union became allies in the struggle against Nazi Germany, it was no longer appropriate to belittle and ridicule the Soviet people or even Communism. The Roosevelt administration decided that German fascism was far worse, and represented, at least in the short run, a much more grave threat to the American way of life. By late 1941, representatives of the Roosevelt administration and the Office of War Information were approaching the heads of the major Hollywood studios, urging them to make films that would help the American public better understand our new ally Russia and its people. The studio chiefs were willing to comply and, over the next few years, until the end of the war in 1945, pro-Soviet feature films were produced by most of the leading studios. It also helped that many prominent Hollywood producers, such as Sam Goldwyn, were Jews born in Eastern Europe, whose abhorrence of Nazi policies of anti-Semitism led them to embrace the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils. The most prominent examples of these pro-Soviet Hollywood films were Mission to Moscow (Warner Brothers), The North Star (RKO), Days of Glory (RKO) and Song of Russia (MGM).

With the end of World War II, however, the Cold War ushered in a period of anti-Soviet feeling unprecedented in its intensity and paranoia. The studios which had produced pro-Soviet films during WWII came under attack from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which initiated hearings into alleged Communist influence in the film business. Russian émigrés who had worked in Hollywood for decades as actors and directors fled to Europe, fearing persecution. Between 1946 and 1962, the production of films featuring Russian characters declined precipitously. For the first time in American history, Russia came to be seen as our primary military, economic and ideological enemy. In the American consciousness, as historians Michael Strada and Harold Troper have written, Russians “became inseparable from the Soviet system.” Soviet-American competition in the field of nuclear weapons and in the space race introduced a new element into the popular perception of Russia.

After the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, films featuring Russian characters began to convey a new message: that Russians and Americans were equally victimized by powers over which they had no control. This is the sentiment of the black comedy Doctor Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and of the James Bond film From Russia with Love, released in 1963. In the latter, the villain is not the USSR, but an international terrorist conspiracy (SPECTRE) that plays the two parties in the superpower conflict against each other for its own evil ends. Instead of killing each other, James Bond (working for the British Secret Service and by extension for the NATO powers) and his Soviet counterpart Tatiana Romanova fall in love and (after many complications including a long and eventful journey by train and boat from Istanbul) escape to Venice for a well-deserved vacation. The idea that “Russians are just like us” was also conveyed in Paul Mazursky’s 1966 anti-war submarine satire, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. 

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, Russians in Hollywood films once again became villainous stereotypes. Such films as Red Dawn, Rocky IV and Rambo III focused on the Soviet military threat to the U.S. and presented Russians as one-dimensional cartoon characters. Even after glasnost and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, these anti-Russian images have endured in major Hollywood feature films. Now the villains are not Communists, but Russian terrorists, mafiosi or corrupt oil magnates, as in The Saint, Air Force One, The Sentinel, The Bourne Identity or David Cronenberg’s brilliant portrayal of the global Russian criminal underworld in Eastern Promises (2007). 

In Hollywood, given the fantastic amounts of money expended on the production and promotion of a feature film, habit and tradition exercise enormous power. Old stereotypes die hard.  RL