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PARTISAN REVIEW
authority of a mission from the President, and sees the inaccessible
heroic or demonic creatures face to face, pleading with them, denouncing
their evil intentions, applauding the good, and offering to the latter
his sincere promise of cooperation. This messenger appears in his own
guise in a prologue to the film to assure the audience, with priestly
gesticulations of the eyes, mouth and hands, that he is a plain Christian
American who has made good. Unlike the great heads of state who are
shown only in their offices and at military reviews, Mr. Davies is often
with his wife and pretty daughter, so that his political role strikes one
not simply as a professional assignment or a fulfillment of private am·
bitions, but as a function of the whole human being, with his family
attachment and the inherent decency of the man who cares for others.
And by this humanization of the envoy, who is called away from a fishing
trip, American diplomacy is transfigured as a moral, humane effort,
an
extension of the naive goodness and intimacy of ordinary people to the
conduct of world affairs. Of this domestication of high politics there
are other examples in the film. Litvinov also travels with his wife and
daughter, and the twin families of the Russian and American diplomats
are joined by ties of the strongest mutual affection. Mrs. Molotov ap–
pears as the manager of the cosmetic trust of the Soviet Union and we
learn that in Russia as in the United States women wish to he beautiful
and that in both countries the wives of diplomats are business women.
When Davies calls upon Churchill in 1939, the English politician, not
yet in the government, is laying a brick wall in his garden, like any
English or American or Soviet workman, while the two wives exchange
amenities.
Nevertheless, the politics of democracy cannot do without the divinely
inaccessible leader. President Roosevelt is shown vaguely as a voice;
sometimes we are permitted to see the back of his head and shoulder,
like the Lord on Mount Sinai; sometimes only a hand is visible, as
in
old Christian images of Moses receiving the Law. The audience is left
in doubt for a moment whether an actor or the President himself is on
the screen. Davies tries in vain to reach Hitler; the devil cannot con·
front this simple, good·hearted American; but he shows himself at a
safe distance to the millions of the Nazi armies and party and appears
in
newsreel shots of triumphal entries into Prague, Vienna and Paris. For
a long time, Stalin is equally remote. But at the very end, as Davies is
about to leave the Soviet Union and is saying good·bye to the dear little
father, Kalinin, Stalin comes in unexpectedly,-a veritable theophany,
which is prolonged by the dictator with an affectionate bonhomie that
convinces us of the double nature, divine and human, of this prime mover
of the Russian sixth of the globe.
Outside these two poles of the human and the superhuman in the
United Nations lie all those treacherous, mediocre, ignorant and foolish
elements who dare to question the wisdom of the great leaders: in Russia,
the traitors who wreck factories and conspire with Hitler and the Mikado;
in America, a swiftly filmed amalgam of pacifists, Bundists, isolationists
and hysterical liberals, who are obstructing the efforts of the President
on the eve of Pearl Harbor. The symmetry of Russian and American
affairs is established with the same combination of newsreels and fabri·
cated reality.
