One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

5. Courting Uncle Joe: The Theatrics of Soviet-American Matrimony

 Following a sumptuous feast (and generous glasses of vodka), the guests, gathered around a Kremlin table in May 1943, toasted SovietAmerican friendship. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov praised the United Nations. Foreign trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan and ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov followed suit. The Americans present—including the sitting U.S. ambassador, Admiral William H. Standley, and his predecessor, Joseph E. Davies—reciprocated. What distinguished this reception from others that periodically honored Soviet comrades was that Davies had arrived as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s special envoy and with a film that he and the president hoped would demonstrate American goodwill and help convince Stalin to act in concert with the major Allied powers throughout the war and beyond. After the toasts were complete, Stalin, a movie enthusiast, led his guests into his private Kremlin theater, where they watched the just-completed Mission to Moscow, a Hollywoodmade , pro-Soviet picture based on Davies’s diplomatic career. As the lights dimmed and the projector rolled, all awaited the dictator’s reaction, on which the fate of this odd coupling of cinema and statecraft hinged.1 The film’s Kremlin exhibition indicates that Mission to Moscow, among the most controversial movies ever, played a minor but significant role in Roosevelt’s Soviet diplomacy. Having determined that the USSR held the keys to both war-       -       time victory and postwar stability, FDR embarked on his equally controversial “grand design” to cultivate Stalin. Mission to Moscow served as one of several confidence-building measures that signaled U.S. friendship and films that prepared the American public for improved relations. Roosevelt’s “courtship” or “wooing” of Stalin spawned legions of detractors , who employ such sexualized language to delegitimize the president ’s “political romanticism.” FDR, a desperate suitor in this scenario, diligently attended to Stalin’s every demand out of a naive belief that the tyrant’s ardor could be won. However, proponents of this viewpoint insist , the president’s courtship failed because his submissiveness only made him appear weak, emboldening the Soviet strongman to behave unilaterally and aggressively. Cold War conflict followed.2 To be sure, FDR has defenders, who point out, among other things, that he had few options for binding the United Nations other than his charm offensive, which gave Stalin nothing (Poland, for example) that the Red Army did not already possess.3 But the point here is the common usage, witting or not, of familial phraseology to describe East-West affairs. The president “blurred the personal and the political,” according to historian Frank Costigliola, and liked to think of his political allies, domestic or foreign , as honorary members of the extended Roosevelt clan. Whereas his critics adopted prematrimonial rhetoric when discussing the alliance of strange bedfellows, FDR welcomed Stalin into “the family circle” at the Tehran Conference, where he also referred to the murderous tyrant as “Uncle Joe.”4 More to the point, U.S. propagandists and Hollywood filmmakers repeated such terms of endearment as they strained to naturalize the unnatural Soviet-American partnership for the moviegoing public, which remained uncertain that the alliance (unlike the “special” bonds of affection with the British cousins) represented anything other than a marriage of convenience. Optimistic U.S. diplomats often eroticized the distant , mysterious USSR as an “object of desire,” Costigliola writes, and developed a “discourse of falling in love or of making love.” MGM’s Song of Russia (1944), appropriately enough, romanticized bilateral relations as a love affair between an American traveler and a Soviet woman, who was made to conform to U.S. sociopolitical norms. International matrimony involved extended family ties, the discourse held. Mission to Moscow insisted that brotherhood linked Soviets and Americans, two peoples who shared a common destiny. Director Frank Capra’s The Battle of Russia (1943), another part of his Why We Fight film series, stood out among testaments to the “kinship” or “friendship” prevailing among the Allied     family of nations, ostensibly united by their wartime experiences and peaceful aspirations.5 However foolish and ill-fated the big screen’s portrait of SovietAmerican matrimony may appear in retrospect, it did help initiate a constructive (if brief and, in the aftermath of the Cold War, forgotten) transnational dialogue that strengthened the fragile East-West coalition.6 Constructive Soviet-American cultural engagement was virtually nonexistent prior to World War II, in no small part because the Soviet Union had isolated itself from the...