The Iron Petticoat (1956) - film review

When a Soviet aviatrix, Captain Vinka Kovelenko, lands at a U.S. airbase in West Germany, the military mistakenly believe she intends to defect.  In fact, Kovelenko is on a one-woman mission to convert the West to Soviet-style Communism.   Major Chuck Lockwood believes that he can win Kovelenko round by showing her the advantages of capitalism and thereby win a propaganda coup against the Soviets.  But Kovelenko’s resolve is made of iron and she has no intention of yielding to western bourgeois decadence, or so it seems...

Just what was Katharine Hepburn thinking?  Teaming up with Bob Hope in a Cold War farce in which she had to put on a Russian accent may have seemed like a good idea at the time but going by the end result you have to question the woman’s sanity.  What most stinks about this film, apart from the outrageous Russian accents and half-hearted direction, is the abysmal screenplay.  Unsatisfied with Ben Hecht’s original script, Bob Hope passed it on to his team of writers with the request to make it funny.  (The said writers appear not to have heard the word "funny", or at least they mistook it for "silly".)  Hecht was so incensed by this that he requested his name be taken off the credits, and rightly so.  The jokes are appalling, the kind of sub-juvenile attempts at humour you will find in a child’s playground or a student debating society.  And the plot - a cynical bastardisation of the Greta Garbo classic Ninotchka (1939) – is hardly any better.   If you ever have to choose between watching this film and being subjected to Chinese water torture, go for the latter – it’s far less painful and you won’t have to endure the grim spectacle of Katharine Hepburn subjecting herself to the histrionic equivalent of hara-kiri.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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