Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians: Biography of an Image, by Harlow Robinson

I’ve long been fascinated by the part of Los Angeles’ cultural history fed by refugees: writers like Thomas Mann and Christopher Isherwood, musicians like Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

The impact on Los Angeles itself was not large, at least at the time. The refugee artists worked independently, many didn’t stay long, and Los Angeles audiences weren’t prepared to appreciate the gift. But the impact on Hollywood, by the artists that found work in the movie business was immediate and enormous. Immigrant film composers like Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, Erich Korngold; directors such as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Douglas Sirk created and defined the Hollywood style for decades to come.

Robinson focuses specifically on immigrants from Russia in this book, telling the familiar stories of leaving the old country excitedly or tragically and finding success or disappointment in the new. Simultaneously, he tells a second story: the way that Hollywood looks to Russia and tells Russian stories. So Robinson gives us both the stories of Russian actors and directors working in Hollywood, and also the stories of American actors and directors, or immigrants from other countries, making movies about Russia, telling Russian stories, and portraying Russian characters. The cover photo, for instance, is of the German actress Marlene Dietrich playing Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress (1934). The Swedish actress, Greata Garbo, played Russian characters in several pictures.

This dual focus gives him a lot of material. I counted 81 films in the “filmography” listed at the back of the book, from The Last Command directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1928 to The Sentinel directed by Clark Johnson in 2006. The book was published in 2007. In between, he covers (among others), Grand Hotel (1932) Anna Karenina (1935), Ninotchka (1939), Frankenstein and the Wolfman (with Maria Ouspenskaya, 1943), For Whom the Bell Tolls (almost all the Spaniards played by Russians – 1943), Spellbound (the psychoanalyst is played by Michael Checkov, nephew of the playwright and a influential acting coach – 1945), All About Eve (the Russian actor Gregory Ratoff plays the producer, Max Fabian – 1950).

Robinson arranges his book chronologically so we get not just the changing fortunes of the immigrants from Russia (who mostly stopped arriving after the 1930s as Russia closed its borders, until a smattering of “defectors” arrived in the 1970s), but also a tracing of the shifting political relationships between Hollywood, USA, and Russia, USSR. Thus, the book is also a history of the 20th century. Sometimes Russia is feared, and then it’s a friend; the Russians are understood as people just like us but oppressed by a totalitarian government, they are idealogical enemies of capitalism and freedom or allies united with us against a common enemy; an idealized, romantic, aristocratic past, a peasant culture of drinking and singing, or dull, grey faces living in poverty.

The most interesting example of this back-and-forth is the rapid shift beginning in the 1930s, when Americans are curious and excited about Russia with it’s five-year plans and rapid industrialization, gathering foreboding when Stalin signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, then shifting to Russia as our ally against Hitler during the war, and then after the war, Russia as the Red Menace and Hollywood the target of the anti-communist witch-hunt having to apologize for the pro-Russian movies it had made as part of the war effort only a few years earlier.

In later years, Hollywood’s Russian movies turn to Cold War spy movies (The Manchurian Candidate – 1962, From Russia with Love – 1963, and many of the Bond films until the two countries unite against Spectre); nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove – 1964); or comedies that ease our anxiety by laughing at it (The Russians are Coming, The Russians Are Coming – 1966; Love and Death – 1975). Robinson gives due notice to the Rocky and Rambo films and then brings us up to date with thrillers like The Hunt for Red October (1990); Air Force One (1997) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004).

As with Robinson’s biography of Prokofiev, which I read and enjoyed, his work here as a researcher is thorough (he saw a lot of movies, including many obscure ones); and his writing is clear and entertaining. He is able to draw upon both his personal knowledge and love of Russia and its culture, and his knowledge and love of the arts, in this case the movie arts. He is a sensitive reviewer of the many movies he cites, a good story-teller of the lives of the actors and directors he mentions, and an accurate historian who compresses a lot of subtle political movement into an easy to follow narrative.