The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, copyright 1965, released 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched the 1965 (that’s the copyright date, though imdb.com lists it as from 1966) film The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, directed by Norman Jewison based on a script by William Rose adapted from a novel called The Off-Islanders (1961) by Nathaniel Benchley. Nathaniel’s father, Robert Benchley, was a well-known author and actor who’s best remembered for his marvelous series of one-reel (10-minute) shorts for MGM in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Nathaniel also had a son, Peter Benchley, who’s best known as the author of the novel Jaws on which Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster hit film was based. Both Charles and I remembered this film from its early days – I saw it in a theatre on its initial release with my father and stepmother, and Charles said he caught it with his family on its first TV showing – but neither of us remembered having seen it since. It’s a Cold War spoof in which a Russian submarine called Спрут (pronounced "sproot" and meaning "octopus") runs aground off Gloucester Island in New England (the Wikipedia page on the film says the island is fictional, but on my last walk through the neighborhood I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt with the island’s logo). The sub’s captain (Theodore Bikel, folk singer and the first Captain Von Trapp in the Broadway premiere of The Sound of Music, with Mary Martin as Maria) sends out a delegation led by Lt. Rozanov (Alan Arkin in his first feature film; he won an Academy Award nomination for his role here and he shows off his fluency in Russian, which he learned from his grandparents) to find a boat somewhere on Gloucester Island which they can use to tow their sub off the sandbar where they’re grounded so they can just head home.

They show up at the summer home (the time is September, right when all the summer tourists on Gloucester are leaving for their normal homes and the population is thinning out so only the year-round “regulars” remain) of musical-comedy playwright Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), his wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint, overqualified as usual in a nothing role that doesn’t challenge her the way her most famous parts in On the Waterfront and North by Northwest did) and their kids, nine-year-old Pete (Sheldon Collins, billed here as Sheldon Golomb) and three-year-old Annie (Cindy Putnam). The Russians show up at the Whittaker home with guns drawn (one of them has a pistol and one has something that looks ominously like an assault rifle) and demand access to a boat. When Walt explains to them that there are no boats on that side of the island, Rozanov demands that Walt “lend” them his car so they can drive to the other side. Walt tries to explain to Rozanov that there’s very little gas in the car, but the Russians take it anyway – and duly run out of fuel not far from the Whittaker home. The sight of Russian sailors in Navy uniforms sparks the predictable fear of an armed Soviet invasion among the U.S. townspeople. The Russians steal an old car from postmistress Muriel Everett (Doro Merande), whom they tie up in a singularly inconvenient position hanging her upside-down from her wall and cutting the phone lines so she can’t communicate with anyone. But before Muriel is immobilized she manages to reach gossipy telephone operator Alice Foss (played by the great British music-hall singer Tessie O’Shea, who appeared on the first Ed Sullivan Show featuring The Beatles on February 9, 1964), who ends up literally tied together with Walt Whittaker. Their attempts to break free from each other despite the Russians’ bondage take on a weirdly sexual aspect – though for Walt to go extra-relational with Tessie O’Shea when his wife is played by Eva Marie Saint would definitely be trading down – especially all the moaning they do as they try to snap the ropes open and get free from each other.

One of the Russian sailors, Alexei Kolchin (John Philllp Law, still in his handsome prime before years of drugging and partying cost him his almost unearthly good looks), falls in love with the Whittakers’ babysitter, Alison Palmer (Andrea Dromm), and the two go for long walks on the local beaches dreaming about each other and lamenting that they’re on opposite sides of the Cold War. The police chief of the town, Link Mattocks (Brian Keith), is actually a voice of reason in the growing hysteria, but he leaves most of the official police response to his hare-brained assistant, Norman Jonas (Jonathan Winters, best known then as a stand-up comedian but oddly cast here in a character that offers him little to work with, though he makes the best of that little). They also have to deal with would-be militia leader Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), who keeps accidentally sticking Jonas with his ceremonial sword, and town drunk Luther Grilk (veteran screen comedian Ben Blue), who in one of the film’s funniest running gags tries to do the Paul Revere number and capture a horse, only the horse keeps getting away from him and when he finally mounts it to ride through the streets telling the townspeople that the Russians are coming, the Russians have already left. One unexpected aspect of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! is the sheer level of paranoia on both sides of the Cold War; the film’s climax features the Russians threatening to fire on the townspeople – and brandishing a cannon with which to do it – immediately if the townspeople don’t return the seven sailors from the submarine (which in the meantime has got itself ungrounded when the tide came in). We know, though nobody in the film does, that the seven sailors are in the cabin cruiser they’ve stolen from the harbor thinking their crew still needs it to get the sub free. Ultimately two children sneak into the old church steeple to get a better look at the confrontation – only one of the kids falls out of the steeple and is impaled on a bracket on the side of the building. Americans and Russians join forces and successfully rescue the boy, and the two sides make their uneasy piece. The Americans even agree to escort the Russians out of the harbor and back onto the open seas, a lucky thing since in the meantime one of the townspeople had alerted the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force sends two pilots to reconnoiter the situation and bomb the Russians if necessary, but fortunately they see the escort and realize it isn’t.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! is a reasonably amusing film, though as a Cold War satire it’s hardly on the level of The Mouse That Roared, let alone Dr. Strangelove, and it did occur to me that it might have been considerably funnier if the part of Walt Whittaker had been played not by Carl Reiner but his performing partner Mel Brooks. It’s an amusing movie and a real curio, but I suspect both Charles and I remembered it as considerably funnier than it turns out to be now. Worth mentioning is the film’s opening credits sequence, which features American and Russian flags doing animated battle with each other as the U.S. is symbolized by “Yankee Doodle” and Russia by three songs – the familiar “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” “Meadowlands” (the hauntingly beautiful World War II-era song, recorded during the war by Paul Robeson in a bilingual English/Russian mix and Alexander Kipnis in Russian) and a third piece I didn’t recognize.