Mission to Moscow (1943)
2/10
Pro-Russian Hollywood propaganda directed by Michael Curtiz two years after he made
Casablanca. Interesting to see Hollywood artifice recreating Germany, Moscow, and even Churchill's garden at Chartwell in the studio, but the the message - 'Stalin is a good lad' - is a hard sell.
You must be logged on to see media items
I hope this isn't too SEB, I hope I'm not teaching granny to suck eggs, apologies if I am
When the UK and Russian became allies in WW2 there was an exchange of camera crews - Russian crews came to the UK to shoot propaganda movies about what great mates we were - iirc there is a well odd movie with Laurence Olivier as a communist shop steward in Glasgow. I am pretty sure Mission to Moscow comes from this programme
The other half of the exchange sent some British crews to the USSR to shoot footage, mostly intended for pathe news. One crew in particular was embedded with Zukhovs 8th red army post Stalingrad. Some of it was used in Pathe newsreals, but most of it was never shown in the UK
All of the footage is now in a University historic film archive, or at least it was at the time.
When I was at Uni I did a lot of C20th stuff, and along with a few other undergrads with similar interests we were invited to view a selection of the material put together but a doctoral researcher. The Russian propaganda stuff was pretty crackers, but the British stuff was utterly horrific.
I really can't stress enough how disturbing it was, and I don't think we were watching the worst of it. We hear about how awful the Eastern Front was, but this footage was truly haunting
I won't try and describe what I saw but one image which still haunts me is set in a railway marshalling yard. There are german prisoners of war, in what are recognisably gestapo/SS/etc uniforms. The Russians are tearing off the insignia from their uniforms and burning their papers in front of them, obviously to remove any way of identifying them. They are then being packed into cattle trucks
The germans, clearly horrible people who have done evil things, are terrified. A look of total horror. Clearly they know what they have done to others, and they know what will be done to them.
There was a lot worse but that was the most haunting image