The Girl in the Kremlin

The first few minutes of this film emerge as one of the most exciting and moving in the history of film. After the haircut, turn off the movie and watch something else. However, don't miss the first minutes of this film. A necessary addition to any collector's library.

I learn from history books that in 1956 the URSS' Communist Party amply criticized the doings of its former First Secretary, Joseph Stalin, died in 1953. With a perfect timing comes out in 1957 "The Girl in the Kremlin".

Back to the film: well, Stalin is not really dead. He is still alive, and plots to regain his dictatorial powers in a now (1957) slightly changed Soviet Union. This an admissible kern idea for a story for the movies: we were comfortable, to say one, with King Kong's destroying Tokyo... But I won't write about the plot: you can find an outline of it in this same site, or elsewhere. I'd like to focus on some other aspects. Here we go.

Thousands and thousands of films have been made with an underlying propaganda undercurrent, and some are very good. But when the thing is so blatant, with all the Soviets represented ab initio as pure idiots, then we are not there. It's like taking Americans (and the rest of the world of movie-goers) for just as many idiots (there undoubtedly have been many of them, and presumably there are still now), if you expect them to believe this nonsense. Paradoxically, those films, always with underlying propaganda, but serious, which treat the characters - whatever their political position - as human beings, just as a normal member of an audience considers her/himself, have the greatest effect. Assuming that something like a "normal" audience ever existed or will exist.

Why does no one mourn the terrible surviving print of this movie? The actors seem to ply their craft through sets flooded with vanilla pudding. I had to ID the characters by movement and relative size.

Most of the time I got it right. Pity.

I saw this movie, fresh out, at the local emporium, right next to the 5-and-dime, just down from the drugstore that served Cokes by squirting syrup in a glass, topping it up with carbonated water and a gentle scoop of ice, with a final vigorous stir of a long spoon. (You got a PAPER straw that usually collapsed before the Coke was finished.) Place had a fancy wooden phone booth. And a shelf of mysterious substances in large glass jars with glass stoppers.

ANYWAY, I digress. As a ten-year-old boy, the opening sequence of this movie showed me that parts of my body were capable of strange and glorious things. That firmly melancholic memory makes me wonder: Does NO ONE possess a better print of this film? Surely a storage box hides in some warehouse, where the ghosts of Lex and Zsa Zsa lament the darkness.

Or, perhaps, some wired wizard, sequestered in Mom's basement, will discover this film from back-in-the-day and, fueled by pizza and Monster, initiate a restoration that will turn back global warming, feed the hungry everywhere, and usher in nuclear disarmament.

Yeah, well ...

"The Girl in the Kremlin" has a ridiculous premise...not quite as ridiculous as "They Saved Hitler's Brain"...but close! It seems that although it was announced to the world that Stalin died of a stroke in 1953, he did, according to this silly story, actually live on by substituting one of his doubles and then having plastic surgery! He did this, apparently, because he knew a purge was coming...and this time it was coming for him!

Despite the notion of Stalin surviving and, perhaps, one day trying to return to power being ridiculous, the film tries very hard to play it straight....and making it seem only 99% ridiculous instead of 100% ridiculous. The only trouble I had with this kitschy film was the ending...as the death scene didn't make any sense at all. See it...see what I mean.

The movie starts in the Kremlin in 1953, where Joseph Stalin (played by Maurice Manson) indulges in his fetish by watching a woman having her head shaved. He then undergoes plastic surgery, watches the people gathering to mourning his death, has the doctor who performed the surgery shot, and then vanishes from the story. For a while, anyway.

In Berlin, former OSS agent and PI Lex Barker tries to gives Zsa Zsa Gabor her money back. She hired him to track down her sister, but never mentioned that she was working in the Kremlin. After she offers him more money, he goes back to work, and decides that Stalin is still alive. But where? There's spy stuff.

I strongly suspect this is an updating of an unproduced script for just after the War, in which Hitler has been replaced by Stalin. It's strictly cheap fare from producer Albert Zugsmith, and the only names I recognize are William Schallert as Stalin's son, and DP Carl Guthrie.