We are an easily frightened species it seems.
While we like to cloak ourselves in the spirit of the enlightenment and speak to our embrace of reason and logic – not everyone, of course, as current events in certain countries give confronting testimony to – it doesn’t take much to get us, or most of us at least, running around like chooks with heads no longer attached.
It’s not productive or conducive to defusing the tension, but goddammit if it ain’t funny, especially in the hands of someone like screenplay writer William Rose and director Norman Jewison who together offer up a stinging indictment of the human condition, and specifically how it reacted at the height of Cold War tensions, that also happens to be laugh out loud hilarious.
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is comedy gold, ratcheting up the paranoia, misinformation and general chaos to the point where the truth, and it is trying to get out via playwright Walt Whitaker (Carl Reiner) who knows why the Russians are actually there, barely gets a look-in.
If you think this kind of situation is a product of a particular period in our collective history, one viewing of this film underscores the true universality of its message, over time and place.
It’s more obvious today in our 24/7 digital news cycle where reported events burst forth with ill-defined momentum and facts and conjecture end up tossed together in one messy muddle, and truth, if it emerges at all, gets drowned out in the ill-informed tumult, but as The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming gloriously illustrates throughout its brilliantly consistent running time, humanity has also had an unfortunate predilection to run, panic and lash out first and then stop to see if there is, in fact, anything to worry about.
Perhaps it’s a product of good old evolutionary fight-or-flight response, but it rarely advantages us, something the citizens of fictional Gloucester Island come to realise all too clearly when nine Russian submariners looking for a boat to tow their beached submarine off a sandbar, suddenly find themselves transformed, by the power of frightened gossip alone, into a parachuting army storming in to take over a sovereign piece of the good old US of A.
The irony is, of course, that the entire reason they beach themselves is because the captain, played by Theodore Bikel, gets carried away wanting to take a look at the enemy, which whom he is somewhat enamoured, and fails to notice how shallow the cove is into which they’ve sailed.
In the early light of morning on a quiet Sunday – you get the feeling that the Martha’s Vineyard-like island (the film was actually filmed in northern California) has many quiet Sundays – the submariners erroneously assume they can quietly zip into town, find a boat and voila, freedom is theirs!
Naturally, nothing goes even remotely close to meeting that plan.
At first, the signs are promising.
The leader of the boarding party, Lt. Yuri Rozanov (Alan Arkin), stumbles upon the summer home being rented by Whittaker, his wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint) and their two children Peter (Sheldon Collins), and Annie (Cindy Putnam) and instructs his team to grab the family’s car and hightail it into town.
But spotted by Pete, who is annoyingly insistent and patriotic to boot, they change tack, taking the family hostage, leaving sweet Alexei Kolchin (John Phillip Law) in charge of the prisoners while the other eight, led by an increasingly-nervous Rozanov, stick to the original plan.
Walt and Elspeth work out quickly that the men are not some murderous invasive force, and when events conspire to give Walt a chance to pursue the men into town – the scene where Kolchin hightails it into the hills, pursued by gunfire and the Whittaker’s dog is genius -he tries to get the towns people, by then whipped into a frenzy if disinformation, to stand down.
He fails, as you might expect in a film where farce overtakes everything, with the only other sane voice, Police Chief Link Mattocks (Brian Keith), struggling to stop the angry mob, egged on by Civil War reenactor Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), from rushing hither and yon in pursuit of rumour, implication and outright unchecked hyperbole.
The melee that results is endlessly, chaotically funny, with islanders rushing to evacuate, others setting out to defend the island and still others left nonplussed in the middle of an uncontrollable situation (and one man, town drunk Luther Griik played by Paul Ford unable to convince his horse to ride to the “rescue” of unaware townsfolk), but it also has a serious side, underscoring how fear, without facts to rein it in, can cause all kinds of trouble, not least inflating a situation that could have been easily and harmlessly resolved with a few cooler heads prevailing.
Granted, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as hilarious, but in a world where people ask questions first and shoot later (but only if they have to) the Russians would have received the help they need and then no doubt been taken into custody by the US military.
This is not what happens, not even remotely, with even the Russians, increasingly boxed in by a scared populace, forced to threaten all kinds of measures than are only resolved when a common issue forces them to come together.
As a viewer, you can see that all it would take would be for everyone to stop, take a minute to get the lie of the land, and all kinds of aggravation and panic could be averted but that doesn’t happen with events spiralling out of control so quickly based on hearsay and gossip that calmer voices such as Whittaker and Mattocks are ignored to the point where even they end up caught in the senseless running around.
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, based on 1961 novel The Off-Islanders by Nathaniel Benchley, is a very funny, very clever film that entertains in ever-escalating ways (much like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World which Rose co-wrote with wife Tania) – you will laugh, oh you will laugh! And often – but which also gets you thinking about the frailty of the human condition at times, the way fear can trump reason and how we can all end up in a whole lot of trouble if wiser, better angels of our nature, don’t ultimately prevail.
It’s all very mirthfully absurd in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming but you get the feeling that film’s main message, which it deftly weaves into its blissfully chaotic storyline, is that if this happened in real life, there’d really be no one laughing, with the stakes in our hyper-connected age even greater than ever.