The Heroic Soviet on the American Screen

Abstract

THE HEROIC SOVIET ON THE AMERICAN SCREEN by Jeff Peck In the present every effort of body is still intensively directed , with all we have and are, toward total victory of this war... At home, [films] have continued to furnish hours of more than ever needed entertainment, ___ [Will Hays, 19441] Motion-picture industry personnel in America during the Second World War expressed their patriotism through numerous organizations, the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization, the Hollywood Victory Committee, or the Committee for the National Morale, or they acted as individuals, delivering speeches, helping in Bond drives, or even enlisting in the armed services . But, in the public view of America's chief moral guardian of the cinema, the primary war-role for Hollywood's pictures was simply the provision of diversion for the laborers on the home front. Certainly, movies from Sergeant York to A Walk in the Sun did much more than provide distraction. However great the aversion to the word propaganda, American films were acting very much in a manner designed to persuade the public to think along optimistic, officially approved lines. And in the second year of America's direct military involvement in the war, this patriotic spirit led Hollywood to the creation of a short series of films that were quite unlike anything the industry had made before-films depicting heroic Soviet Russians. BACKGROUND To be sure heroic Russians had long been seen on the American screen. Especially after the Kishinev massacre in 1904, the plight of Jews in Tsarist Russia seems to have been a popular setting for early romantic melodramas, no doubt popular among America's large Russian and Jewish Jefafaney Peck, who took his training In fallm at the University ofa Wisconsin, Madison, Is currently a lecturer In the Division ofa Cinema Studies at La Tnobe University In Australia. 54 immigrant population. Reviewing one of this early generation of films, Russia, the Land of Oppression (Defender, 1910), The Moving Picture Herald commented: A very graphic reproduction of the terrible scenes of persecution which have been enacted among the Hebrew race in Kief and Kishineff. . .Happily the heroine of this picture has the general 's son for lover, and she is saved from the unmitigated tortures and dishonours of Siberia by his intervention. There is a feeling of exultation when they are shown landing at Ellis Island, the gateway to the land where cruel persecutions of that character do not exist. 2 America was the country where the most vocal public protests were mounted against the tyranny of the Tsar. American films of the period appear to have reflected this concern. The Russian revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar, of course, made these topics impossible after 1917. However, not surprisingly, American films about Russia continued with the same general formula, but with the tyranny simply having changed hands. Instead of Tsarist oppressors , it was now the Reds. At least as early as 1921, with David Butler 's Making the Grade, this was the case. The slightly altered formula now pictured a hero of noble birth, forced by the terrors of the revolution to pose as a peasant. He or she falls in love with a peasant working for the "Reds." And where, more or less simultaneously, the Bolsheviks demonstrate their true barbaric nature, and the hero reveals his/her blue blood, the peasant helps the hero to escape—sometimes to America, but now more often (demonstrating perhaps a more sophisticated post-war worldliness) to Paris. UniversalJewel 's Bavu_ (1923) , First National's Into Her Kingdom (1926), Fox's Siberia (1926), MGM's Mockery (1927), Universal 's Surrender (1927), Tiffany-Stahl's Clothes Make the Woman (1928), United Artist's Tempest (1928), and First National's Song of the Flame all follow this general outline. Making the Grade varied somewhat from these others in that it introduced an American hero into the scene. The picture portrays an American soldier in Russia who falls in love with a Russian school teacher. After the obligatory harrowing and narrow escape from the hands of the Bolsheviks, the two marry and leave for the United States. Back in America it is learned that the school teacher is, in fact, a...