The Russians are Coming/The Russians are Coming

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The Russians are Coming/The Russians are Coming is a splendid 1966 comedy where director Norman Jewison asked a vital question: What happens when they come?

It was asked at the right time, because by the mid-sixties the Russophobia pumped up when the Cold War was in its 1950s deep freeze was being tempered, especially after the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War was still very much in business, but a certain amount of backing off was happening. Jewison offered a very jocular look at this backing off.

“They” arrive in the Sproot (Russian for octopus), a Soviet submarine whose Captain (Theodore Bikel) is obsessed with getting a good view of America; so much so that the crew in the control room see that he’ll crash the sub into the American shore. They rouse Lt. Yuri Rozanov (Alan Arkin in his first film role), an officer the men trust, frantically warning him something has to be done. It’s apparent the crew’s trust in their captain’s competence has its limits. Rozanov argues with the Captain to turn around, but the appeal of the misty shoreline from periscope view is too much of a siren song for the Captain. His childish intensity overcomes the realities of geography, but geography wins as the Sproot slams into a sandbar.

The Captain panics. He has to get the sub free before the U.S. military find out and react. An international incident means that in addition to an American attack, he’ll have a lot of explaining to do to the Soviet admiralty. Independent action by naval commanders was not a greatly prized virtue in the Soviet Union.

He sends a nine-man detachment on shore to procure a boat and get the sub loose from the sandbar and thus escape before anyone finds out. Since it’s a Sunday, it all should be easy-peasy. . . or perhaps easy-peaski. Yuri is put in charge. He has his doubts, but orders are orders.

The detail lands on Gloucester Island (there are a few stabs at pronouncing it properly) and have no knowledge where anything is, but Yuri knows it is an island, and where you find an island, you find boats. Simple.

He leads his men as Russian music follows their steps, especially the stirring Meadowlands as Yuri and his men surge on.

I like Joseph F. Biroc’s cinematography. He captures the vast, lonely shoreline with the sea in the background, and depicts the isolation and solitude of a seemingly uninhabited Cape Cod. The camera’s eye makes the marching men shrink down to a parade going nowhere.

Yuri spies a beach house and garage. He and his men can take the car, find a boat, and. . . easy-pea ski.

Of course Peter Whittaker, a boy, sees them and rushes inside to his parents Walt and Elspeth (Carl Reiner and Eva Marie Sainte) to warn them the you-know-who are not only coming, but they’re in the garage. They ignore him, far more concerned with breakfast, Walt dealing with finishing the second act of a play opening on Broadway, and Elspath with packing for their return to New York.

A knock on the door turns heads, and Yuri, along with the handsome, blue-eyed mate Alexski (John Phillip Law) ask for help. A feeble attempt to pass themselves off as Norwegians fails as Yuri sees the Whittakers are wise to him. He pulls out his revolver, and quickly interrogates Walt on the island’s defenses, military, and where can he get a boat.

The only boats are several miles away in town. A flustered Yuri piles his men into the station wagon, looking like a clown car Soviet style, leaving Alexski to watch the Whittakers.

In the house everyone is uneasy, including Alexski, who is clearly not the evil monster Russians are presumed to be. He is a good sailor doing his duty, but a young man uncomfortable wielding a machine gun. Panic ensures when Alison, the babysitter, arrives. She had been seen by Yuri and his clown car crew as they drove past her on her bike, and she frowns. Why are so many strange men packed into the Whittaker’s car?

Alexski orders everyone to stay put, then a noise from the stairs makes him aim. The Whittakers shout as Annie, their child, ambles down for breakfast. Alexski is stunned. He almost shot a child. He tries to be kinder to the Whittakers, but Walt, more out of fear than bravado, jumps Alexski and wrestles for the gun in a rough and tumble farce throughout the house as everyone climbs on, falls off, ducks, hides, and eventually Walt gets the gun and Alexski bolts off, Walt waving the machine gun. . . with part of the drapes covering the barrel, making him look caught up between victory and waving a white flag from the barrel.

Annie, spooning her cereal, giggles at all the fun.

Of course everything goes wrong, as everything does in this film. Again, I enjoy the spacious landscapes of the photography, and how everyone gets swallowed up by the empty sand dunes and endless sea. Gloucester is only a minor island off the New England shore. This is the land that obsessed the Captain, and everyone sinks into it.

Yuri and his men run out of gas. They seek another car, and yes, are seen again, this time by the island’s postmistress. They tie her up, take her car, and continue the quest for a boat.

I note the decor of the period; a staid, second-hand 1966 that is totally unlike the swinging Sixties elsewhere. The cars are old, perhaps pre-WWII junkers. There is nothing trendy about Walt’s station wagon. He obviously hasn’t written a blockbuster play yet. When we see the townsfolk, they are dowdy, old, and their clothes seem stuck in the fifties, if not the forties. All are prime examples of the old New England parsimoniousness. It’s obviously not a hot tourist spot like Provincetown, and recalls my hometown’s Missouri staidness that matched much of America in that supposedly swinging time.

Yuri and his men go off to find a boat. When the postmistress is freed, she rings up Alice, the switchboard operator, a corpulent and gossipy woman, and from the postmistress’s excited rant, she deduces Russian paratroops are landing at the airport, or what passes for one.

Alice rings up Link Mattocks (Brian Keith), the grumpy police chief who doesn’t like being woke up on Sunday morning. He calls his patrolman, Norman (Jonathan Winters), and gathers a few men to check things out. . . and don’t tell anyone.

Alice has already lit up the switchboard, and the island is aroused.

Walt, now trying to make it to town, has no choice but to use Alison’s bike (“A girl’s bike,” Pete sourly observes; his father is not only a coward and traitor, but a sissy), and it’s a great visual seeing Walt wobble on the bike, swaying against the empty dunes worthy of silent film. It’s a reminder of the period. In the sixties, adults didn’t ride bikes, and if you were over fifteen and on a bike, you got stares. Walt is a lousy cyclist, anxious, and trying to hide his embarrassment using a bike making a boob’s progress.

Like Yuri, Walt tries to maintain a calm, adult demeanor, but it doesn’t work.

Everyone in this film is caught up in trying to be controlled, in command, competent, but the situation won’t let them. The comedy here is not what people try to do, but how they’re frustrated attempting anything important.

A new presence gets dumped into this cluttered chowder. Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), the island’s VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) commander, is roused by Alice’s call and pulls together his fellow vets and islanders to take arms to fight off the Russians.

Link now has to deal with several carloads of men toting guns of various calibers and age led by a fustian Hawkins waving a sword, ready to fight.

A sour Link drives to the airport to check on the Russian paratroops, tailed by several carloads of armed men. Jonas is left to hold the town. He gathers more men in the town bar, where he succumbs to the confusion, and becomes a herder of cats, albeit well-lubricated ones.

Luther (Ben Blue), the town drunk, tries to rouse people, but Jonas tells him to go tell other people, just to get him out of the way. Luther, seeing all the cars are gone, will do his by riding a horse to warn everyone. The horse, however, has other ideas.

Meanwhile the Captain has his crew push the Sproot off the sandbar and it is free to escape. . . but not without Yuri and his detail.

Walt makes it to Alice and tells her to call for help. . . real help, but Yuri captures Walt and Alice, ties them together, and heads off on the ever-elusive hunt for a boat. Tied face-to-face, Walt and Alice are like Siamese twins of chaos.

In town, Yuri and his men see the perfect boat for their mission, then it is swarmed by Hawkin’s militia. Another long sigh from Yuri. He is calm, but Arkin makes him like a chess master making a masterful move, only to find himself in perpetual check.

He deduces a plan by breaking into a dry cleaner, has his men wear civilian clothes and try to get people to stay indoors. He coaches them on speaking English, and they are ready to chorus in unison “E-mair-gen-cy: every-body-to-get-off-street.”

They see a young boy, pronounce their order, and he cries off and calls for his mother. So, this plan works; sort of.

A diversion lets Yuri’s men get the boat, speeding off as the militia uselessly pour gunfire of varying calibers and buckshot in the direction of the speeding boat.

In contrast to the hullabaloo in town, Alexski and Alison talk, laugh, and walk on the beach with Annie playing, and discover they like each other. Alexski declares his love of peace, and it’s almost a sigh of relief amidst the scramble around them. This placidness ends when Walt returns, meets up with Yuri, and having taken Alexski’s machine gun (again), fires at Yuri as he drives a VW. Has he killed him? Shaking off the windshield glass that decorates him, Yuri only sighs. “You have only wounded my dignity,” he says, summing up the morning’s flubbing.

All of them team up to go into town and explain what’s going on.

Norman, when hearing Walt describe the submarine, now decides the Russians are invading the island from the sea as well as the air. Walt, for all his truth-telling, is ignored. The Sproot sails into the harbor, and the town confronts the sub, as the Captain demands his detail be returned, or he’ll have his deck gun open up on the mass display of shotguns, .22s, war surplus rifles and. . . not Hawkin’s sword. In a pique of anger, Link broke it over his knee.

Instinct overtakes reason. This island dilemma recalls another island story about human herding, Lord of the Flies, the William Goldman novel where a group of British schoolboys land on an island while a nuclear war begins, left to their own. At first they are hale and hearty British lads, but slowly become a tribe of savages.

One child psychiatrist read the book, and his only criticism was the time frame of the boy’s decline of a few weeks to become savages. He said it would only take one long weekend.

After killing the weaker of the tribe, the boys now converge on Ralph, the last “civilized” boy, and is saved by the arrival of a British officer, his ship offshore.

On Gloucester, this Deus-ex-machina doesn’t arrive. Instead, a boy, watching the approaching showdown from a building, slips and dangles from its gutter. Townspeople and Russians look on in horror and flood to the building to form a human pyramid, led by Alexski, to rescue the boy.

It’s a brilliant example how instinctive human behavior, first reacting against invaders, now joins in saving a child. . . another herd instinct to guard the young that unites islanders and Russians. It is the enlargement of the earlier scene where the appearance of Annie for breakfast stuns the Whittakers and Yuri, Alexski shocked he turned his machine gun on a child. It reminds us that human instinct isn’t all bad. When fear is overcome and it’s a good instinct, it leads to a happy tribe. It leads to rescuing a child. To Alexski and Alison kissing. It’s not soppy or saccharine; Jewison’s view is optimistic.

This herd instinct leads the islanders to swarm around the Sproot as it sets sail from air force jets who responded from a frantic radio message from Hawkins.

The sub and its crew have now become a kind of endangered child, and all creatures protect their young. The jets can only intimidate or attack, and are confused at the flotilla, and return to base.

It was the right film at the right time, a kind of hopeful reaction unlike the nuclear disaster films like Fail-Safe or Dr. Strangelove.

If I have two criticisms of the film it is that the first few minutes the frantic situation on the Sproot is in Russian with no subtitles. I would have liked to have had more insight into the Captain’s motivations and the interchange among Yuri and the crew. This was, after all, 1966, and Americans didn’t like subtitles. They preferred dubbing, and the subtitle didn’t gain a foothold until seventies films.

A second fault is that the Captain (note how he is nameless) is a mysterious, undefined character. He wants to see America, but why? He seems to be ill and coughs a lot. Theodore Bikel does a good job in maintaining him as a strong presence, but I would have liked to have heard dialogue.

Certainly he is not a malevolent force, much like Captain Finlander (Richard Widmark) in the Cold War film The Bedford Incident (1965), who, as an almost manically driven skipper, leads his destroyer to pursue an unseen Russian sub with disastrous consequences. The Captain isn’t such a malevolence. His threat to open fire on the town is because he wants his missing crew back.

But these are minor complaints. The story is very warm and human, and again, the photography and location are well-filmed. The film also almost observes the classical unities of time, place, and action, occurring only within a few hours on a lonely island on Sunday. Everyone gives a good performance and their characters aren’t caricatures, but little people caught up in trying to be big ones, or what they assume bigness is, or others frustrated that once the event takes over, they are helpless to throw around what little authority they think they have. All the cast, even little Annie, are a key to the story. It was a good film to come out just after Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe as well as The Bedford Incident. Films about nuclear war, the paranoia of the unseen and almost shadowy Russian.

Again, I note the well-used local scenery and color photography. I think it’s no mistake that the Cold War doomsday films mentioned above are in stark black and white, while Jewison’s comedy is in color, for color is life and hope. The beach romance of Alexski and Alison offer a hopeful future of understanding. Before The Russians Are Coming, the only good Russian in popular media was David McCallum’s Ilya Kuryakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.