The movie chronicles the experiences of the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union and was made in response to a request by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was made during World War II, when the Americans and Soviets were allies, and takes an extremely solicitous view of not only the USSR in general but of Stalinism and Stalinist repressions in particular. For that reason, it was scrutinized by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Source book
The film is based on Joseph E. Davies' memoir[3] about his time as the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union from November 1936 to June 1938. It was published by Simon & Schuster in 1941 and was a critical and commercial success—700,000 copies were sold, and the book was translated into thirteen languages.[4]
Plot
Joseph Stalin (Manart Kippen) greets U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) in Mission to Moscow.
The film chronicles ambassador Davies' impressions of the Soviet Union, his meetings with Stalin, and his overall opinion of the Soviet Union and its ties with the United States. It is made in a faux-documentary style, beginning with Davies meeting with president Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss his new appointment as United States ambassador to the Soviet Union. It continues to show the Davies' family's trip by boat to Moscow, with stops in Europe.
While in Moscow, the movie alternates between Davies' interpretations of Soviet politics and communism and his family's impressions of Russian life. It includes a memorable scene with Mrs. Davies at a Russian department store. The movie gives Davies' perspective on various points in Soviet history. It begins with the real ambassador Davies stating, while seated in an armchair, "No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government during those critical years between the two world wars."[5] The film then cuts to Walter Huston (portraying Davies) and begins its narrative.
The voice-overs continue throughout the film, interspersing storyline with Davies' opinions. The film's narrative focuses on the journey of Davies and his family. First, their physical journey from the United States to the Soviet Union. And, second, their less tangible journey from skeptics of communism and the Soviet Union into converts and enthusiasts. The narrative of the movie and the book are almost identical.
While the storylines of both the book and movie are practically identical, the movie uses cinematic techniques and dialogue changes to overstate or change some controversial points in the book—changes that were made with Davies' approval. Although the first draft was written by Erskine Caldwell, the final screenplay adaptation of the book was by Howard Koch. Its musical score was by Max Steiner, its cinematography by Bert Glennon. The extensive montage sequences, which draw on footage from Soviet archives, were supervised by Don Siegel. The picture was produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Ambassador Davies appears and introduces the film as himself; he is then portrayed by Walter Huston. Ann Harding plays his wife Marjorie Davies, Gene Lockhart is Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Henry Daniell his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Dudley Field Malone plays Winston Churchill. Most parts, bar those of Davies' family, are taken by character actors who look like the famous politicians they are representing.
The film was the first pro-Soviet Hollywood film of its time and was followed by others, including Samuel Goldwyn's The North Star (1943), MGM's Song of Russia (1944), Three Russian Girls (1943), Columbia's The Boy from Stalingrad (1943) and Counter-Attack (1945). Roosevelt himself approved the creation of the film, even meeting with Davies several times (July, October, and November 1942 and March 1943) during the film's production to discuss its progress.[6]
As part of his contract with Warner Bros., Davies had absolute control over the script and could veto any dialogue not to his liking.[7]
Curtiz wanted Fredric March to play Joseph E. Davies, while Olivia de Havilland auditioned to play Marjorie Davies. Pat O'Brien was cast as a Catholic priest, while Irene Manning was cast as a Moscow Opera House singer. Both characters were cut from the final film.[5]
During production, Office of War Information officials reviewed screenplay revisions and prints of the film and commented on them. By reviewing the scripts and prints, OWI officials exercised authority over Mission to Moscow, ensuring that it promoted the "United Nations" theme. An administration official advised the film's producers to offer explanations for the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Red Army's invasion of Finland. After reading the final script, in November 1942 the OWI expressed its hope that Mission to Moscow would "make one of the most remarkable pictures of this war" and "a very great contribution to the war information program".[8]
The OWI report on Mission to Moscow concluded that it would
[B]e a most convincing means of helping Americans to understand their Russian allies. Every effort has been made to show that Russians and Americans are not so very different after all. The Russians are shown to eat well and live comfortably, which will be a surprise to many Americans. The leaders of both countries desire peace and both possess a blunt honesty of address and purpose ... One of the best services performed by this picture is the presentation of Russian leaders, not as wild-eyed madmen, but as far-seeing, earnest, responsible statesmen. They have proved very good neighbors, and this picture will help to explain why, as well as to encourage faith in the feasibility of post-war cooperation.[8]
Government information specialists were equally enthusiastic about the completed print. Judging it "a magnificent contribution" to wartime propaganda, the OWI believed the picture would "do much to bring understanding of Soviet international policy in the past years and dispel the fears which many honest persons have felt with regard to our alliance with Russia". That was particularly so since "the possibility for the friendly alliance of the Capitalist United States and the Socialist Russia is shown to be firmly rooted in the mutual desire for peace of the two great countries".[9]
The film, made during World War II, shows the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in a positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film is, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film's producer, "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation".[11]
The movie gives a one-sided view of the Moscow trials, rationalizes Moscow's participation in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, and portrays the Soviet Union as a state that was moving towards a democratic model, a Soviet Union committed to internationalism. The book was vague on the guilt or innocence of defendants in the Moscow trials, but the film portrays the defendants in the Moscow trials as guilty[12] in Davies' view. It also showed some of the purges as an attempt by Stalin to rid his country of pro-Axis "fifth columnists".[13] Some "fifth columnists" are described in the film as acting on behalf of Germany and Japan. The film "defends the purges, complete with a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky was a Nazi agent".[14] In the film, Davies proclaims at the end of the trial scene: "Based on twenty years' trial practice, I'd be inclined to believe these confessions."[5]
According to film historian Robert Osborne, "At the time this movie was made it had one of the largest casts ever assembled ... was very successful ... When it was shown in Moscow, despite all the good will, people who saw it considered it a comedy—its portrayal of average, everyday life in the Soviet Union apparently way off the mark for 1943".[15] "When the RussiancomposerDimitri Shostakovich saw it, he observed that no Sovietpropaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies."[16]
Reception
Some reviewers despised the film[14] but there have been exceptions. The critic for The New York Times, future McCarthy opponent Bosley Crowther, found the film's attempts to rehabilitate Stalin believable:
Based entirely on the personal observations reported by Mr. Davies in his book, it will obviously prove offensive to those elements which have challenged his views. Particularly will it anger the so-called Trotskyites with its visual re-enactment of the famous "Moscow trials"...For it puts into the record for millions of moviegoers to grasp an admission that the many "purged" generals and other leaders were conspirators in a plot.[17]
Box-office
Unlike the book it was based on, the film was not a success at the box-office. Although Warner Bros. spent $250,000 advertising the film before its release on April 30, 1943, the company lost around $600,000 overall at the final accounting.[18]
According to Warner Bros records, the film earned $1,017,000 domestically and $632,000 foreign.[1]
Mission to Moscow's numerous factual inaccuracies and outright false portrayals of Soviet leaders and events resulted in criticism from those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.[19]
Later, film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars.[14]
Controversy
The film's pro-Soviet tone was criticized in the United States even at the time of its release. John Dewey wrote an op-ed to The New York Times calling Mission to Moscow "the first instance in our country of totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption--a propaganda which falsifies history through distortion, omission or pure invention of facts." The Republican National Committee called it "New Deal propaganda." At the same time, the film initially had its defenders. Herman Shumlin called the film "an instrument for understanding and friendship between the Allies." Senator Sheridan Downey read a letter from a United States Armysergeant serving in the Italian campaign into the Congressional Record noting that Nazi propaganda he had seen criticized the Soviet Union in similar terms to American critiques of the film.[5]
The House Committee on Un-American Activities would later cite Mission to Moscow as one of three examples of pro-Soviet films made by Hollywood, the other two being The North Star and Song of Russia.[21] It's been called "unquestionably the most blatant piece of pro-Stalinist propaganda ever offered by the American mass media".[22]
In 1950, the film became an object of attention by members of Congress, who saw it as pro-Soviet propaganda. Davies was largely silent on his role in the film, though he did submit a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.[23] Called to testify under oath before Congress, Jack L. Warner at first claimed that the film was made at the request of Davies, who with the approval of FDR had asked Warner Bros. to make the film (this version of the facts was confirmed by Davies' letter as well).[23] He said:[24]
The picture was made when our country was fighting for its existence, with Russia as one of our allies. It was made to fulfill the same wartime purpose for which we made such other pictures as Air Force, This Is the Army...and a great many more. If making Mission to Moscow in 1942 was subversive activity, then the American Liberty ships which carried food and guns to Russian allies and the American naval vessels which convoyed them were likewise engaged in subversive activities. This picture was made only to help a desperate war effort and not for posterity.
Warner later recanted this version, stating that Harry Warner first read Mission to Moscow and then contacted Davies to discuss movie rights.[23]
Mission to Moscow was one of hundreds of pre-1948 Warner Bros. movies sold for television screenings, but was never included in domestic syndication packages put together by its then-owner, United Artists. It had its U.S. TV debut on PBS in the 1970s and has been shown sporadically on Turner Classic Movies, featured in the January 2010 series "Shadows of Russia" and most recently broadcast on January 30, 2017. The film's ownership has returned to Warner Bros. via its purchase of Turner Entertainment and the title made its DVD debut in October, 2009 as part of the Warner Archive Collection.[25]
Ninotchka is a 1939 American romantic comedy film made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by producer and director Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. It was written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, based on a screen story by Melchior Lengyel. Ninotchka is Greta Garbo's first full comedy, and her penultimate film; she received her third and final Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1990, Ninotchka was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2011, Time also included the film on the magazine's list of "All-Time 100 Movies".
The Battle of Warsaw, also known as the Miracle on the Vistula, was a series of battles that resulted in a decisive Polish victory in 1920 during the Polish–Soviet War. Poland, on the verge of total defeat, repulsed and defeated the Red Army.
The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning, in particular through the forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization of the Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, ethnic cleansings, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps and during famine.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, nicknamed the Red Napoleon, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. He was later executed during the show trials of 1936-38.
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny was a Soviet cavalryman, military commander during the Russian Civil War, Polish-Soviet War and World War II, and politician, who was a close political ally of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other forms of media, the OWI was the connection between the battlefront and civilian communities. The office also established several overseas branches, which launched a large-scale information and propaganda campaign abroad. From 1942 to 1945, the OWI revised or discarded any film scripts reviewed by them that portrayed the United States in a negative light, including anti-war material.
The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, also known as the Military Case or the Tukhachevsky Case, was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army, a part of the Great Purge.
Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir was a Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Howard E. Koch was an American playwright and screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood film studio bosses in the 1950s.
Joseph Edward Davies was an American lawyer and diplomat. He was appointed by President Wilson to be Commissioner of Corporations in 1912, and he was the first chairman of the Federal Trade Commission in 1915. He was the second ambassador to represent the United States in the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg. From 1939 to 1941 Davies was special assistant to Secretary of State Hull, in charge of War Emergency Problems and Policies. From 1942 through 1946 he was chairman of President Roosevelt's War Relief Control Board. Ambassador Davies was special advisor of President Harry Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes with rank of ambassador at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
Helmut Dantine was an Austrian-American actor who often played Nazis in thriller films of the 1940s. His best-known performances are perhaps the German pilot in Mrs. Miniver and the desperate refugee in Casablanca, who tries gambling to obtain travel visa money for himself and his wife. As his acting career waned, he turned to producing.
Nikolai Vladimirovich Skoblin was a general in the White Russian army, a senior operative in the émigré expatriate Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) and a recruited Soviet spy, who acted as an intermediary between the NKVD and the Gestapo in the Tukhachevsky affair and was instrumental in the abduction of the ROVS chairman Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in 1937. He was married to the Russian singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya. A number of important details about his cooperation with the USSR′s intelligence agencies as well as exact circumstances of his death have remained controversial and contested.
Song of Russia is a 1944 American war film made and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The picture was credited as being directed by Gregory Ratoff, though Ratoff collapsed near the end of the five-month production, and was replaced by László Benedek, who completed principal photography; the credited screenwriters were Paul Jarrico and Richard J. Collins. The film stars Robert Taylor, Susan Peters, and Robert Benchley.
The North Star is a 1943 pro-resistance war film starring Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan and Erich von Stroheim It was produced by Samuel Goldwyn Productions and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. It was directed by Lewis Milestone, written by Lillian Hellman and featured production design by William Cameron Menzies. The music was written by Aaron Copland, the lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and the cinematography by James Wong Howe. The film also marked the debut of Farley Granger.
Spaso House is a listed Neoclassical Revival building at No. 10 Spasopeskovskaya Square in Moscow. It was originally built in 1913 as the mansion of the textile industrialist Nikolay Vtorov. Since 1933, it has been the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and since 1991, to the Russian Federation. The building belonged to the USSR and later Russia and, under the 1985 lease contract, the U.S. was supposed to pay 72,500 Soviet roubles per year, which by 2001 was the equivalent of about $3, which the U.S. had failed to pay in 1993. In 2004, the two sides concluded a new 49-year lease that was said to be based on a joint assessment of the property's value; the rent rate was not disclosed.
Louis V. Arco was an Austrian stage and film actor whose career began in the late 1910s.
British Intelligence is a 1940 spy film set in World War I. It was directed by Terry O. Morse and stars Boris Karloff and Margaret Lindsay. The film, also known as Enemy Agent, was released in the United States in January 1940. The Warner Bros. B picture was based on a 1918 play Three Faces East written by Anthony Paul Kelly and produced on the stage by George M. Cohan. Two film adaptations of Three Faces East in 1926 and 1930 preceded British Intelligence.
Grigori Vasilyevich Aleksandrov or Alexandrov was a prominent Soviet film director who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1947 and a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1973. He was awarded the Stalin Prizes for 1941 and 1950.
British Agent is a 1934 American romantic espionage film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Leslie Howard and Kay Francis. It is based on Memoirs of a British Agent, the 1932 autobiography of R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who worked for the British Secret Service during the Russian Revolution and had an affair with a Russian agent, later known as Moura Budberg. The film was produced by First National, then a division of Warner Bros.
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of the "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The "Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center" ;
The "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" ; and
The "Case of the Anti-Soviet 'Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites'".
References
1 2 3 Warner Bros financial information in The William Shaefer Ledger. See Appendix 1, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, (1995) 15:sup1, 1-31 p 23 DOI: 10.1080/01439689508604551
↑ "Mission To Moscow". Victor Gollancz Limited. August 27, 1945. Retrieved August 27, 2022– via Internet Archive.
↑ Koppes, Clayton R. and Black, Gregory D. (1987) Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley, University of California Press. p.190.
↑ Downs, Bill (June 14, 1943). "Giggles in Moscow". Newsweek. p.88. The Russian premier of Mission was staged at the Kremlin, following a banquet for an international audience of diplomatic elect. Flanked on one side by a translator, and on the other by a beaming Joe Davies (then on his return engagement as missionary to Moscow), Stalin sat poker-faced throughout the two-hour tribute to his people and regime.
↑ Brendon, Piers (2007). The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Random House (reprint). p.498. ISBN978-0-307-42837-0. "Compared to the sophisticated Kennan, of course, Davies was generally crass and credulous. He considered Stalin kindly and trustworthy, a friend to children and dogs."
Barmine, Alexander (1945) One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons; reprinted Read Books (2007). ISBN1-4067-4207-4, ISBN978-1-4067-4207-7.
Blahova, Jindriska. "A Merry Twinkle in Stalin's Eye: Eric Johnston, Hollywood, and Eastern Europe." Film History: An International Journal 22.3 (2010): 347-359. online[dead link]
*Culbert, David H. "Revisiting a Stalinist Puzzle: Mission to Moscow." American Communist History (2013) 12#2 pp 117–135.
Fedorov, Alexander. "Positive image of the USSR and Soviet Characters in American Films in 1943-1945." Journal of Advocacy, Research and Education 1#1 (2015): 33–36. online.
Kapterev, Sergei. "Illusionary spoils: Soviet attitudes toward American cinema during the early Cold War." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10.4 (2009): 779-807 online.
Sbardellati, John. "Brassbound G-Men and celluloid reds: The FBI's search for communist propaganda in wartime Hollywood." Film History (2008) 20#4: 412-436. online
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