Emergency, Emergency! Please to Get to Store to Make Rentings ot The Russians are Coming!

I have come to the conclusion, after having seen several of them, that I generally do not like movies about submarines. U-571? Das Boots? Monstrously depressing. Hunt for Red October? Just a notch better. Heck, even Atlantis was a downer and Yellow Submarine was an acid trip. But one submarine movie that I can always count on to satisfy my sensibilities is The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming. It may help that virtually none of the movie takes place in the sub itself, and because of that it probably shouldn’t even count as a submarine movie at all. But I digress. There are a few comedies that I hold sacred (and highly quotable). Short Circuit. Sister Act. Princess Bride. A Christmas Story. Blues Brothers. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Well, you get the idea. But my list would be incomplete if I failed to mention this gem of a Cold War film about small-town hysteria, a group of misunderstood foreigners who just want to get back home, and one man who observes the madness unfolding around him and wonders why everyone can’t just get along.

The movie stars Carl Reiner as Walt Whittaker, the straight man of sorts in this comedy of errors. While our first impression of him is that he’s a belligerent crank, we gradually come to see what an incredibly decent fellow he is – and we begin to appreciate how he might come across like Mr. Wilson when his son makes Dennis the Menace seem a perfect angel by comparison. It’s that young son, Pete (Sheldon Collins), who first notices the strange men creeping up on the house, and throughout the rest of the movie, he loudly voices his disappointment that his father is not doing enough to stop these interlopers, making it clear that if he could get his hands on a shotgun, he’d blow them away without a speck of remorse.

The strangers, of course, are the titular Russians. The movie is dated now because nobody worries much about Russians anymore, but at the time they were of grave concern. The official reason for Chekov’s being included in the cast of Star Trek was that Roddenberry thought that would be the best way to demonstrate the extent of the harmony among races in the future (though I read elsewhere that the primary motivation for his inclusion was to win over teenie-boppers with a guy who looked like Davy Jones). At any rate, the trouble begins when a Soviet submarine runs aground after its rather dim-witted and volatile captain (Theodore Bikel) comes in for too close a look at America, which he has never seen before. As a result, the sub is stuck, and he delegates a small task force to find a boat with which to pull the vessel out to sea.

Most prominent among the landing party are Lt. Rozanov (Alan Arkin), the leader who seems intimidating at first but is clearly compassionate and level-headed, and Alexei Kolchin (John Philip Law), a jittery youth whose task of keeping the Whittakers secured at home turns from hair-raising to harmonious with the departure of demon child Pete and arrival of shapely babysitter Alison Palmer (Andrea Dromm). Arkin is maturely dashing with his leather jacket and mustache, while Law is blue-eyed and baby-faced. Rozanov seems like he’s in his late 40s, while Kolchin appears to be a teenager, but at 32, Arkin was only three years older than Law. Both are a pleasure to watch – and to listen to. There is something so inexplicably musical about broken English, whether or not the actors actually have accents themselves. (They don’t.)

Walt is drawn into the events of the day because it is his house they happen to come to first. While Kolchin hides near the Whittaker household, Walt sets off for town, where he finds hysteria has begun to set in thanks to a phone call by paranoid biddy Muriel Everett (Doro Merande) announcing that the Russians have landed. The tale grows more outlandish by the minute until rumors of paratroopers and an overtaken airport whip the villagers who haven’t already packed up their bags and left into a frenzy. An instrumental aid in spreading the rumors is Alice Foss (Tessie O’Shea), the gossipy local telephone operator who initially takes Muriel’s call. Long-suffering police chief Link Mattocks (Brian Keith) has major doubts as to the veracity of these claims, but his attempts to keep order are thwarted by Hawkish Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), a sword-toting, decorated veteran all too eager to lead an assault against the invaders.

As we started watching this movie the other night, my dad pondered whether many Russians saw the movie and what they thought of it. Later, he wondered if small-town New Englanders might have cause to be just a mite offended by the film’s events. Certainly the foibles of these provincial characters shine, allowing the film to reach the height of its comedic potential, but there is nothing mean-spirited in the portrayal. The Russians, meanwhile, come across as consistently decent, aside from the captain’s occasional bursts of apparent insanity. In the end, though, he’s an upright chap as well, and we’re left with a vision just as hopeful as Roddenberry’s, that many major conflicts have roots in simple misunderstandings and that the people we most fear and despise often are not so different from us. A fine message indeed from one of the funniest movies around.