Comrade X

In the days when actresses had genuine accents that put a lilt in their speech, Hedy Lamarr, like Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, had refinement and intelligence, and could portray "foreigners" from any number of countries. Here, Hedy is supposed to be Russian, and with a light touch, too. She makes a charming foil to beefy Clark Gable, who plays his usual role as the macho-male with a wink in his eye covering a heart of gold. Their chemistry is not quite as magical as that in "It Happened One Night," with Claudette Colbert (who had the softer edge and mysterious sex appeal that truly complemented Gable's), or even his pairings with the brassy blonde with the Brooklyn accent, but there are a number of scenes in this farce that I have not seen equalled elsewhere: namely the escape scene in the Soviet tank. Before the age of graphic simulation, the prop men really had to come up with a phalanx of Soviet-style tanks -- unless they used miniatures, and to see them "chase" Gable, with Hedy at the wheel, is almost on a par with a Chaplin or Keaton routine. The miming of the Soviet tank army is also hilarious.

Ernst Lubtisch's classic comic statement about Communist Russia, NINOTCHKA, came out in 1939. Whether it "influenced" the production (also by MGM) of COMRADE X or not I could not say. Certainly there are similarities between the comedies. Lubitsch set his comedy in Paris, where a Communist trade mission is living it up, being corrupted by an émigré Russian noble (Melvin Douglas) so he can try to retrieve jewelry that the trade mission is using as collateral. The Russian government does not trust the three men sent, so they send a fiercer ideologue (Greta Garbo in the title role) who starts straightening out the mission, until she falls for Douglas's charm. In the end she is lured back (with her three associates) to the west and away from the Soviet paradise.

NINOTCHKA had Felix Bressart and Sig Ruman in the cast as two of the members of the trade mission. Comments on this thread point out that in the 1930s "accents" were fairly interchangeable in Hollywood, so that the Swedish Garbo (and later the Austrian Lamarr) became Russian. So did German Ruman and German - Jewish Bressart (who would also play a Hungarian in THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER).

Unlike NINOTCHKA, COMRADE X is set inside that nightmare land, Stalinist Russia. Somebody is sending out unofficial (but thoroughly correct) news stories showing the crimes being committed in Russian by the government against the people (i.e. the purges), as well as the idiotic projects and waste mismanagement illustrative of how poorly the government is as effective government. This is being resented by the Presidium, who is represented by Oscar Homlolka (Commissar Vasiliev). Please note that Homolka's make-up makes him look a tremendous bit like one Joseph Stalin. At a public funeral covered by the press court, someone tries to shoot Vasiliev (who does all he can to hide the assassination plot). Mac Thompson (Clark Gable), the American reporter, manages to snap a photo of an odd site - a bearded man who a moment before the shooting opened up the lid of the coffin and popped out. This bearded gentlemen turns out to be one Michael Bastakoff (Vladimir Sokoloff), a rival of Vasiliev for power. He is made to look a tremendous bit like one Leon Trotsky.

Get the message from Hollywood here? Vasiliev's agents have been trying to pin down the news leaks, and has narrowed it to two figures: Thompson, and one Emil Von Hofer (Sig Ruman) who is the news representative from Nazi Germany. Ruman manages to demonstrate it ain't him, so (despite Gable's breezy denials) Vasiliev believes it is the American.

Gable has a close friend in Moscow, one Ygor Yahupitz (Felix Bressart) who is his sometimes valet. Ygor's daughter is Galubcha (Hedy Lamarr) who is a streetcar operator. Ygor wants Gable to try to smuggle Galubcha out of the Soviet Union into the U.S. And the film shows (among other things, including overcoming Galubcha's fierce belief in the Communist ideal) Gable eventually saving both the girl and her father.

The comedy is quite amusing, even if it lacks the style and grace of the Lubitsch touch of the first film. But it certainly comments on the atmosphere within Russia in a way that NINOTCHKA failed to do so. The centering of the comedy in Moscow, the suggestiveness of a Stalin - Trotsky rivalry clone, and the heavy control over information is certainly more realistic than Douglas' being elegant and eloquent about the beauties of Paris.

One more thing to keep in mind is a scandal which is on target with this film, and which (in 1940) finally began to raise eyebrows. In the early 1930s the New York Times had a reporter named Walter Duranty in Moscow. He turned out to be a fantastically well informed reporter in the Soviet Union, and came out with interviews and articles that were tremendously informative. In fact, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow. But as time passed, Duranty's methods and sources were heavily questioned. He also tended to take an official line about the Purge Trials (i.e., that Bukhanin, Radek, Zinoviev, Tuchochevsky, and the other hundreds and thousands of victims were all actual traitors against the Stalinist regime). After the signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, the Times became very suspicious of Duranty, and replaced him. The quality of the articles became very much more even handed. Duranty was later revealed to be a Stalinist agent. Interestingly enough, the Pulitzer Committee has repeatedly rejected requests to take back their award from Duranty's heirs as his work was pure propaganda. So the issue about the control over the news from Russia was very, very real.

Who would have guessed that the usually wooden but dazzlingly beautiful Hedy Lamarr could be so delightfully funny, adorable and charming as she is in this Ninotchka role. It's a pity that she was rarely --if ever again-- given another opportunity to play this sort of anything-goes screwball comedy. Hedy here is as real and believable as Carole Lombard at her best. The script written by Ben Hecht ("Nothing Sacred"), Charlie Lederer ("The Front Page" screenplay) and the uncredited Herman Mankiewicz ("Citizen Kane") is a bizarre hard-boiled political satire ending with a lengthy and totally absurd slapstick Russian tank chase through the woods and across the river into Rumania. It looks as if it came straight out of a Max Sennett movie. Gable is his usual tough and handsome self, wonderfully adept with the throw-away gags he is given. The rest of the cast is rounded out with some of the best European character actors then living in Hollywood --the Germans Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart and the Viennese Oskar Homoloka—- all playing Russians and Germans. As an added bonus there is the first on-screen appearance by the rarely seen Berlin-born actress, Natasha Lytess ("Olga"), best remembered now as Marilyn Monroe's first acting coach way before her Lee Strasberg days.

I thought the chemistry between Hedy and Clark were great. She really came off as a very good commedienne. I thought the lines were real clever and that ending...wow...all those tanks. I enjoyed this movie more than the Ninotchka.

CLARK GABLE and HEDY LAMARR share the screen in a romantic comedy along the lines of "Ninotchka", which made such a success for Greta Garbo. Obviously, Louis B. Mayer hoped COMRADE X would do for Hedy what the other film did for Garbo's image--and to some extent, it did.

It's not as sophisticated and witty as the Garbo film, but Hedy plays a dedicated Soviet woman who thinks that an American that she is attracted to (CLARK GABLE) shares the same philosophy. FELIX BRESSART is her scatterbrained father, EVE ARDEN is an American newspaper woman and SIG RUMAN is a loyal Nazi foreign correspondent in Russia who is just as confused as everyone else as to the identity of "Comrade X".

It's a good role for Hedy, playing her role very much the way Cyd Charisse played the Russian gal in "Silk Stockings", and with a comic flair that she seldom exhibited in any of her MGM films, even the so-called comedies. Gable is more or less himself as the cynical newspaper man who ends up taking his bride (Lamarr) to America after they've had a few escapades that have the Soviet authorities chasing them all over the hillsides in tanks--the film's most amusing moments.

One of the funniest performances comes from NATASHA LYTESS, as Olga, a secretary who tells Gable she's a spy. Her drunken antics are a highlight (she can't see a thing without her glasses). Lytess was Marilyn Monroe's acting coach for several years, the superstar being dependent on her for her every move during her early films at Fox.