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Abstract
This article challenges the view that one of America’s most important sources of entertainment and persuasion, Hollywood, transformed its coverage of the Cold War during the 1960s. In particular, it questions whether American cinema really altered its attitude towards Soviet communism. It does this principally via an in-depth analysis of The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, the second highest-grossing American Cold War movie of the 1960s and the most Soviet-friendly one. The origin, production, content and reception of the film are looked at in detail, and the film placed fully within its cinematic, cultural, political and diplomatic context.
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The article explores Soviet films of the cold-war period by Aleksandrov, Romm, Kalatozov, and Abram Room, as well as the unfinished "Farewell America" by Aleksandr Dovzhenko. These films focus on the juxtaposition between the USSR and the enemy (Fascist Germany or capitalist America); they reflect the destabilized world system in which the Soviet Union-victorious, but isolated after the war-asserts its moral superiority. The films restore an ideological equilibrium upset by the war, and thus create the illusion of stability and, for the Soviet Union, superiority. They cushion the viewer in a safe scheme of moral and political values, reassuring him of the world order. This accounts for the popularity of the films in their day.
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a rich and complex science fiction film that was clearly trying to communicate many messages to the American film audience of 1951. The film's Cold War themes resonated with its original viewers. But could a contemporary audience extrapolate any meaning from this film nearly six decades after its theatrical release? The author describes how this classic Hollywood film has telling reverberations for what has transpired in America post-9/11.
Very few movie producers in Hollywood challenged the Cold War proscription against criticism of United States policy. Julian Blaustein, however, established his career as an independent producer by putting together the package for Broken Arrow and selling it to Twentieth Century-Fox. Blaustein knowingly hired Albert Maltz, a blacklisted screenwriter, to adapt the novel on which it was based. Blaustein then produced one of the earliest pleas for world peace, the science-fiction classic: The Day the Earth Stood Still. But his third effort, Storm Center, a challenge to censorship, failed, and his independent production company failed with it.
