Up until a few years ago, we in America had thawed our cold war fears of Russia. The USSR had fallen, Bush Sr and Gorbachev had met, and the Berlin Wall had been torn down. Relationships between our two countries were amiable, if not stellar, and I even knew a family that vacationed in Moscow. That seems like a lifetime ago now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the tensions of war have once again ignited animosities between our two nations. This makes a film like The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! suddenly relevant again. What is old is new, and the world feels like it’s back in the cold war all over again.
It’s human nature to poke fun at tense situations as a means of dissolving some of that tension. We see that in the tongue-in-cheek quips of James Bond as he takes on Russian spies in From Russia With Love. Many other films also utilized the Russians as the villains so that American audiences could see a heroic character punching out the ‘foreign’ baddies. It was a way to put a face to this faceless ‘enemy’ and to get audiences to relax a little from what was in reality a very tense standoff between two superpowers. With the Russians back in the headlines amid global tensions, it’s about time to revisit a film like The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
This film began life as a Nathaniel Benchley novel, The Off-Islanders. Benchley was a Massachusetts-based author who also worked for a time for Newsweek as an assistant drama editor. His writings ranged from drama, horror, satire, biographical, and even children’s literature. Screenwriter William Rose, who was adept at both American and British comedies, who had worked on such acclaimed scripts as The Lady Killers and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, penned the screenplay for The Russians Are Coming, bringing in some American history with that title clearly referencing the famous ride of Paul Revere. For his work on this movie, he would receive a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination, losing out to Robert Bolt for A Man for All Seasons.
Despite being based on a fictitious island off of Massachusetts, the film was shot in northern California. The production company did a decent job of hiding this fact, but there are some telltale signs that this is not New England, including obvious signs of the volcanic rings of fire that cannot be seen on the eastern seaboard. Still, most people wouldn’t catch something like that, at least not on their first viewing, and if you did, this film was probably not engaging you in the first place.
The setting is modern-day, at the time, New England, and a Russian military submarine runs aground on a sandbar off the coast of Gloucester Island, Massachusetts, population 200, when the commander was trying to get a look at North America. Rather than risking embarrassment and an international incident by radioing for help, the captain sends a nine-man landing party, headed by his Political Officer, Lieutenant Yuri Rozanov (Alan Arkin), ashore to find a large enough boat to pull the submarine free.
This leads them to the house of Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), his wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint), and their two children, Pete (Sheldon Collins) and Annie (Cindy Putnam). Walt is vacationing on the island, using the quietness to focus on his writing. But now that the summer is ending, he is looking forward to leaving the island behind. Pete sees the nine Russian men hiding around their barn, but when he tries to warn his father, he is ignored, assumed to be imagining things or making jokes. Eventually, though, two of the Russians, Yuri and Alexei (John Phillip Law), come to their door pretending to be Norwegian fishermen looking for a boat. Their story, not to mention accents, gives them away, and the gig is up. Yuri and the other men steal the Whittakers’ car while Alexei stays behind, holding the family hostage. From here, things spiral downhill as word gets out that Russians have ‘invaded’ the island, a militia is formed, panic ensues, and everybody expects the worst of the other side.
This is first and foremost a comedy. We are not to take the proceeds seriously. Instead, we are to look at it as a farce, a silly little story that is there to hold a mirror up to our faces and show us how stupid all this bickering and warring really is. The face of the Russians is Yuri (played by newcomer Alan Arkin), and what an introductory role this is for him. I don’t speak Russian—nor did most of the people seeing this in theaters in 1966–but Alan is making it sound like he can actually speak the language like a native. I’m sure a native speaker could pull it apart, but to my ear, it sounded credible. The accents, on the other hand, whenever he, or any of the other actors, tries to speak English, are less than stellar. But this film isn’t trying for authenticity; it is a farce after all.
With that in mind, it is playing up the tropes. It recreates the Paul Revere ride complete with the call “The Russians Are Coming?” but it turns it on its head. Instead of the competent and heroic Paul Revere, that ride is given to the town drunk who spends most of the picture trying to catch his horse before he can ever make that ride. When he finally does, the crisis is over, and he is riding into town to announce what everyone is already fully aware of. We also get examples of extreme patriotism, especially from Walt’s son Pete, who eggs his father on to do dangerous things by calling him a traitor for not risking his life unnecessarily.
Farces like this are not easy to pull off. Steven Spielberg tried it with 1941, a film that many felt was his first and biggest flop. That film has its fans but is almost universally considered to be wildly inconsistent. Ultimately, the problem was that it swung for the fences and was trying too hard to be madcap and zany. The Russians Are Coming takes a less-is-more approach. There are some moments that are uproariously funny. But there are also moments where the humor is in the situation, not in what the characters are saying or doing. This allows for the film to avoid the pratfalls of trying too hard to get a laugh out of us. There are plenty of well-established comedians thrown into the mix, some really hamming it up like Jonathan Winters, but these are the exception rather than the rule. The best of these lesser characters is Western star Brian Keith playing the local law. He’s playing it straight, annoyed by all the insanity going on around him.
Unfortunately, as the film starts getting heavily into the plot, it loses some steam. Around the time Yuri and his men are hiding out in town, stealing clothes from the laundromat and disguising themselves as the townsfolk, it bogs down in too many characters and plot points. This is worsened by an obvious message about our shared humanity when Alexei meets Alison Palmer (Andrea Dromm), a young woman who has been helping the Whitakers pack for their move off the island. Alison sees Alexei for who he is, a nice young man and not an enemy of America. Their blossoming relationship is cute, but unearned and serves only as a means to moralize. Likewise, the climax where the townsfolk and the Russians have to team up to save the day and get the Russians back out into the water feels like more of the same moralizing. Just like the romance between Alexei and Alison, it is all too brief and feels unearned.
We do need to remember that not all Russians are bad people, intent on Western domination and expansionism. As we live in a world where Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine and wage war in Europe, we can sometimes forget that this doesn’t represent all Russians and that they are people just like us. This film may be inconsistent in tone and has some pacing issues to boot, but deep down it is a light-hearted romp poking fun at xenophobia and our fears of the other. This message is as important now as it ever was in the heart of the Cold War.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Norman Jewison
Best Actor: Alan Arkin
Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium: William Rose
Best Film Editing: Hal Ashby and J. Terry Williams
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Release Date: May 25, 1966
Running Time: 126 minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Alan Arkin, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters, Theodore Bikel, Tessie O’Shea, Ben Blue, John Phillip Law, Andrea Dromm, and Paul Ford
Directed by: Norman Jewison
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