MovieChat Forums > Mission to Moscow (1943) Discussion > didn't make it thru the trial scene...

didn't make it thru the trial scene...

posted 14 years ago by RashomonLaStrada
3 replies | jump to latest

I had to change the channel when they got to the trial scene. Making those murderers look righteous vs. the "traitorous trotskyites" was more than my stomach could take.

Stalin was the second greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. Period.

But maybe this movie can show us the absurdity of propaganda movies. Look at the depiction of the "evil" Japanese ambassador in MTM. I recently watched Kurosawa's "MOST BEAUTIFUL" -- a Japanese WWII propaganda movie in which the young women factory workers recite their daily oath to "destroy the British and Americans."

"The good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is why it is called Fiction."

[–] hobnob53 14 years ago

I've had to explain the truth about the purges to others who have watched this film, so I sympathize with your feelings. Even in 1943, this movie came in for heavy criticism from liberals who attacked it for its historical distortions and lies, singling out the purge trials for particular opprobrium.

Still, it's important to watch the film and understand it in its context. As we've said elsewhere, it's very much a relic of its era, made for a particular purpose and with a particular (often dishonest) point of view. But better to see it, discuss it rationally and informatively, and expose it for what it is, while at the same time understanding and appreciating the film -- for its cinema, its own historical meaning, and the reasons why it was made the way it was. Life, unlike many films, is seldom black-and-white.

[–] phelpsg1 14 years ago

I'd heard about this film but never seen it, and found it a fascinating artifact. I hadn't realized that the director of this heavy-handed piece was Michael Curtiz, who had just done Casablanca. What a contrast! The treatment of the Moscow purge trials was perhaps the most outrageously propagandistic part, and one that Robert Osborne's bland TCM intro didn't really prepare us for. Wasn't it true that only hard-core Stalinists took these trials and confessions at face value, even at the time? Davies was certainly no Communist, but seems to have been extremely naive (I loved the scene where he says that it's OK for the Russians to bug the embassy!), and probably eager to please leftists in the FDR administration. My suspicion is that FDR deliberately sent him to Moscow as a "softie" to butter up Stalin as a possible ally against the growing Nazi threat.

[–] hobnob53 14 years ago

I have an original copy of Davies's book, and to be fair to him, he's portrayed as much more naive (more duped by Soviet propaganda) in the movie than he comes across in the book. He is more critical of the USSR amd some of Stalin's policies in his writing than he's seen as in the film. Still, he was unduly impressed by Stalin and obviously taken in to some extent. But you're right, he did consider it necessary, as did FDR, to try to pull Stalin into the Allies' camp against Hitler, both before the war and of course after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June, 1941.

I like Robert Osborne, but I think his historical knowledge is limited, and he certainly could be more accurate and informative on many films from that perspective. He seemed to take great umbrage at Jack Warner's apologizing for making the film, even though requested to do so by the government. What he said is true as far as it went, but he didn't put things in their proper context, or elaborate on the movie's inherent dishonesty and distortions, acting as if it was criticized merely for its favorable depiction of a wartime ally who was no longer in fashion in 1947.