And so Warner, not wanting to appear unpatriotic, dutifully had his movie factory assemble this lugubrious, painfully clumsy verbose propaganda piece, based the memoirs of Roosevelt's Ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies. Davies himself, speaking with all the excitement of someone who's just chug-a-lugged a whole bottle of Ambien, introduces the film, ponderously justifying his make nicey-nice mission to the Kremlin. And son-of-a-gun, he discovers those purge-lovin', five year plan totalitarians aren't such bad guys after all. If you're still awake after that....the movie proper starts.
What follows next, you need to watch with a sense of distancing, historical perspective......only in this once-in-a-lifetime moment in history, when America was fighting for its life, could such an insanely bizarre film exist, slapping heavy coats of whitewash on a brutal dictatorship and its oppressed people. Ambassador Davies (played by Walter Huston) and his family head for his posting in Russia, first stopping off in Germany, where the movie unleashes a barrage of frightening vignettes (Hitler youth marching, scary stock footage of Nazi rallies and loads of Warner Brothers character actors as sinister Germans...)
Once in Russia, Davies gets treated to a Warners backlot Never-NeverLand view of Russia that's closer to Disneyland than the USSR......including happy hard-working laborers of both sexes..(our favorite exchange: Woman Miner: "You don't let women work in the mines?" Davies: "There's no law against it....but we don't put women underground unless we have to." Yikes...) Stalin, Molotov and all the Russian bigwigs, played by an entire army of l940's character actors, come off as soft-spoken, polite grandfatherly types. When they launch the infamous purge trials, which takes up a hefty chunk of the middle of the film, the cross-exams between the prosecutors and the sure-to-be-executed accused sound like a junior high debate with all the participants heavily sedated.
By the time "Mission To Moscow" staggers to its conclusion ( with Davies' return to the U.S., whipping up rah-rah fervor for Russia) it gives up being a movie altogether, devolving into an endless montage of Davies speechifyin', followed by a heavenly chorus underscoring a crowd of people approaching.......we guess it's the Warners art department rendition of a glorious futuristic vision..... but to us, it looked like the Emerald City Of Oz. Demented from beginning to end, this movie was meant for a permanently sealed time capsule, to be opened...uh....never.
As you might imagine, consequences and vengeful payback hit this movie hard after the war's end and the start of the Cold War. With Russia now a reviled and feared enemy, HUAC, the Congressional Red-hunters, held this misbegotten movie up as Exhibit A in their rooting out of Hollywood commie sympathizers. Jack Warner managed to successfully beg their forgiveness, playing the 'FDR-Made-Me-Do-It' card, but Howard Koch, the film's screenwriter. was promptly blacklisted and forced to exile himself to Europe, writing scripts under pen names.
BQ could only recommend this oddest of oddities to hardcore classic movie buffs and students of history.....the bulk of it remains borderline unwatchable for casual entertainment viewing. But as lunatic as "Mission To Moscow" is, it might very well appeal to our current Commander-In-Chief, who equates Russia and the United States as equal nations of killers. For sane, reasonable people, we'd give the film 1 star (*) For anyone else who buddies up with a KGB thug and see no difference between us and Russia...it's a 3 star delight.(***)
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