Film Chroni,cle:
"Mission to Moscow' '
T..
FILM
m•ion of
MO,,U,n
w
Mo"ow
ha• little a,ti,tio value, and
the
crudity and falseness of its content will hardly escape the eyes of
informed people. Not only are the Moscow Trials re-staged as genuine,
but new falsifications are added to the originals. Marshal Tukhachevsky,
who was never publicly tried and was shot without benefit of confession,
appears in open court with the other alleged conspirators. All those
passages in Mr. Davies' book, in which he reveals how doubtful he was
during the trials, are brazenly covered in the film by an enactment of
his complete certitude in the court-room; in his own text he admits that
only later events had led him to "see" the justioo and significance of the
trials. The history of Soviet and American foreign policy is retold with
a similar disregard for fact, for reasons which must be clear to anyone
who has followed closely the actual shifts during the last ten years.
These falsifications and their political meaning will no doubt be
exposed in fuller detail in the labor press. But the historical and political
content of the film should also be considered from another angle, as a
type of propaganda film new to this country. The events leading up to
the war are presented at the same time as the headlined history familiar
to newspaper readers and also as the personal experience of an official
eye-witness and participant. Through the combination of newsreels of
Hitler Germany and Stalin Russia with the reenacted story of Mr. Davies,
the latter takes on the qualities of an authentic historical reality. As
he passes from shots of Nazi demonstrations, in which the whole Ger–
man people seem to be massed before Hitler, to a scene of Davies-Huston
making a futile proposal of disarmament to Schacht-Basch, the specta·
tor feels himself transported behind the scenes to enjoy the same direct
contact with the secret historical process as in his contemplation of the
public review of the Nazi army. He knows that these are only two
Hollywood actors, but he is led to believe by the surrounding context
of news reels and by the official character of the film, based on the con–
fidential reports of an American Ambassador and approved by the
Soviet government, that the actors are reproducing the original events
rather than Mr. Davies' version.
At the same time the sentiment of the little man of the democracies
that
world politics are a mysterious game in which figures beyond his
own plane of vision manipulate the fate of the world for motives which
are never quite clear is dissolved by the omnipresence of a plain-spoken
American, who moves about everywhere armed with the wonderful
275
