Mission to Moscow (1943) - film review

In 1936, President Roosevelt appoints Joseph E. Davies, an eminent lawyer, as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.   Davies’s mission is to make an assessment of whether an alliance with the Soviet people would be effective in defeating fascist Germany in the event of a war.   Ambassador Davies is most impressed by what he sees during his stay in Russia.  The Soviets have a formidable military and are eager to ally themselves with friendly nations like America and other European countries to defeat Hitler and build a peaceful future for mankind.  Yes, that nice Mr Stalin is just the kind of man we should be doing business with...

They say that Truth is the first casualty of war and this film certainly proves it.  Watching Mission to Moscow today it is hard to believe that this could ever have been conceived as a serious piece of wartime propaganda.  Just how naïve, gutless and ignorant did those responsible for it think its audience was likely to be?  Subtlety clearly wasn’t part of the brief when Warner Brothers set out to convince a Communist-fearing American public that Joseph Stalin was not, as some would have it, a neurotic megalomaniac dictator with psychopathic tendencies, but was in fact that nice genial benefactor of mankind who brought children their Christmas presents every year whilst waiting for the Vatican to issue him with his sainthood.

Mission to Moscow was based on the best-selling book of the same title by Joseph E. Davies, the United States’ ambassador to the U.S.S.R. in the years leading up to WWII.  It was directed by Michael Curtiz, a highly regarded Hollywood filmmaker who is perhaps best known for the classic Casablanca (1942).  It was at the personal request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Warner Brothers adapted the book for cinema, as part of a propaganda campaign to convince the American people that a close alliance with the Soviet Union was essential, not only for defeating Hitler, but also to safeguard peace after the war.   

However much one agrees with the motives behind this film (the Allies could not have won the war without the Soviets’ immense sacrifice and the U.S.S.R. was key to the creation of the United Nations), it is hard not to take offence at the way the film distorts the facts in order to paint the Soviet regime at that time in the most positive light.  Seeing Stalin depicted as the benign leader of a Utopian society in which women are happy to be sent down coal mines is something that chills the blood.   As it turned out, the film was not a success – most critics loathed it and it bombed at the box office.  If anything, this kind of heavily biased leftwing sentiment merely aggravated anti-Communist feeling and helped fuel the McCarthyist witch-hunts of the late ’40, early ’50s.

Whilst it may fail as an effective propaganda piece, Mission to Moscow is not without interest to a student of cinema.  Assuming you are able to correct for the obvious pro-Communist slant, it does provide a record of the events leading up to America’s entry into WWII which is broadly accurate (in the Wikipedia sense of the term).  Overall, it is a well-made production which effectively evokes the mood and drama of its time through the use of montage and newsreel footage.

© James Travers 2008

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