On Christmas Eve, 1942, screenwriter Howard Koch was packing for a trip to New York when he received an urgent summons to meet with his bosses, Warner Bros. founders Harry and Jack Warner.
After thanking Koch for his contributions to “Casablanca,” which had opened a month earlier, the moguls ordered a reluctant Koch, as his patriotic duty, to whip out a script for an unusual pro-Soviet propaganda epic to be directed by “Casablanca” helmer Michael Curtiz.
“Mission to Moscow,” which arrives on DVD Tuesday (at warnerarchive.com) after decades in obscurity, turned out to be Warner Bros.’ most notorious production, an eye-catching jaw-dropper labeled by a critic as a “$2 million love letter” to dictator Joseph Stalin, now best remembered as the No. 2 mass murderer of the 20th century.
Most remarkably, the film Jack Warner would call the only one he ever regretted making — after a grilling before the House Un-American Activities Committee that sent Koch into blacklisted exile — was personally commissioned by the President of the United States, who asked Warner Bros. to make it as part of Hollywood’s efforts to whip Americans into a patriotic frenzy during World War II.
“President Roosevelt himself asked Harry and Jack Warner to assist in educating, entertaining and enlightening the American people,” says Harry’s granddaughter, film historian Cass Warner. “Little was known about the Soviet Union, who were our allies at the time, [but] this never came to the forefront even when the film was used as evidence of the Bros. making subversive films during the McCarthy Era.”
Americans in late 1942 still deeply distrusted the Soviets, who had joined World War II on the Allied side after earlier entering into a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Hollywood’s depiction of the USSR up to that point was mostly unsympathetic; Greta Garbo, playing a commissar in “Ninotchka” (1939), quipped there would be “fewer but better Russians” following Stalin’s notorious purge trials.
With the administration’s encouragement, Hollywood quickly began praising Russian soldiers and brave peasants facing down the Nazis in films like “The North Star,” written by Lillian Hellman, and the musical “Song of Russia.”
But the Warners took this wartime love-fest to delirious heights of insanity with the lavish “Mission to Moscow,” which incredibly arrived in theaters just four months after Koch was summoned by the Warners. Koch very loosely based his script on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, an FDR pal who had served as the US ambassador to the USSR in the late 1930s.
“Mr. Stalin, history will remember you as a great leader,” Davies tells a grandfatherly, benevolent Stalin, played by Manart Kippen, one of an army of character actors chosen for their resemblance to real-life figures.
Davies, a wealthy corporate lawyer married at the time to cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (Eleanor Parker), the richest woman in the US, is played by Walter Huston, a distinguished actor associated with all-American roles. He had the title part in D.W. Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln” (1930) and the year before “Moscow” was Oscar nominated as James Cagney’s father in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Depicted as the epitome of a capitalist, Davies at one point waves away concerns about Communism.
“How they keep their house is none of our business,” he tells a crowd in Madison Square Garden. “I’m concerned with what kind of neighbor they’ll be in case of a fire.”
“Mission to Moscow” is amazingly entertaining, thanks to Curtiz, a Hungarian justly famed for his ability to keep an audience engaged with fancy camera moves during long dialogue scenes. He deftly maneuvers a huge cast on vast sets, skillfully weaving in lots of documentary footage from the Soviet archives. It’s a tribute to Curtiz, Huston’s skill as an actor — and the rousing score by “Casablanca” composer Max Steiner — that some of the movie’s bald-face lies actually sound plausible.
Stalin is portrayed as recognizing the Nazi menace before the West did, and striking the alliance with Hitler to buy time for himself and the Allies. The Soviets invaded Finland to “protect” it from the Nazis. And the purge trials of Stalin’s political foes were a response to, you guessed it, a Nazi plot.
The film was widely criticized even at the time of its release as wildly fantastic pro-Soviet propaganda.
When the winds of the Cold War began blowing after World War II, Jack Warner was called on the carpet in Washington, with “Mission to Moscow” cited as the No. 1 example of Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
Congressional probers wouldn’t accept Jack’s explanation the film was “made only to help a desperate war effort and not for posterity,” so he fingered Koch as a Communist — and his brother Harry soon announced production on the more politically correct “I Was a Communist for the FBI.”
“Mission to Moscow,” which did not turn a profit, was buried deep in Warner vaults after its initial run. It wasn’t until the late 1970s until this remarkable product of its time finally turned up on TV, part of a PBS series on propaganda films.
Despite its historical importance, there have been few opportunities since to see what the American Film Institute called “one of the strangest documents of our political and cultural history.”
Lou Lumenick, The Post’s chief film critic, helped program a series of films about Russia’s image in Hollywood films that will air in January on Turner Classic Movies.