Perception of Soviet Russia in Hollywood Films Essay

Perception of Soviet Russia in Hollywood Films - Essay Example During the time of Ninotchka (1939), this American sentiment was anti-Soviet, but first this film depicted the union of "the spirit of Marxist ideas" (Rogin 269) with the spirit of a business enterprise - clearly, a parody of "the conversion of the former to the latter" (Rogin 369). It was in the same year, 1939, that the USSR "signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939 and divided Poland with Germany" (Dunn 459). Ninotchka is an epitome of an anti-Soviet film. Like any other such film, "Every Russian- whether peasant or nobility- is caricatured as villain incarnate and the whole nation is represented as a threat to mankind, nineteenth-century style" (Fyne 194). Understandably, American sentiments toward the Soviet Union at the time of these anti-Soviet films are a degradation of communism as symbolized, at that time, by none other than the USSR. According to Fyne, Ninotchka was an "strong indictment about a regime that most Americans, sitting comfortably in their capitalist living rooms and reading about mass executions, feared and mistrusted" (200). In 1943, that sentiment changed drastically. It must be noted that this time was after Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, "the U.S. and the Soviet Union were now brothers-in-arms" (Fyne 200), hence this new alliance "had to be solidified on the screen" (Fyne 200).