Comrade X

I visited my dad over the weekend, and you know what that means: Old movies! Although Turner Classic has gone in a direction with their choices that don't really tickle his fancy. He says it's good they're shining a light on actors most people wouldn't get a chance to see otherwise, but it's not working for him.

Comrade X is a mysterious foreign correspondent in pre-WW2 Soviet Union, who somehow gets out reports on what goes on in the USSR, past the diligent censors. I'm sure that drunken layabout, McKinley B. Thompson (Clark Gable) wouldn't know anything about it. But the valet at the hotel he stays thinks otherwise, and is going to blackmail Thompson into ;eaving Russia, and taking his trolley driver daughter, Theodore (Hedy Lamar) along with him. Of course, to do that requires Thompson convince Theodore he is a died-in-the-wool Communist, and that she would be perfect for spreading their mission in the West.

The movie came out in 1940, and so the Soviet Union is shown in somewhat gentler tones than it would be by the end of the 1940s. Not shown positively, everything is breaking down constantly, with no idea when things will get fixed. Theft is rampant. There are still spies and informers everywhere, ready to report you to the Secret Police, but it's played mostly for laughs, Clark Gable outwitting most of them by getting them drunk, or double-talking his way past them. When the correspondents are informed the previous Minister of Information has died in a "traffic accident", they treat it as a joke, business as usual. They don't seem more than mildly annoyed when told they won't be allowed to send out any stories until Comrade X is hunted down.

You do see darker elements, when that brutal power gets directed at innocent civilians and people who actually believe the government stands for what it says it does. The attempts to erase history by killing everyone who might serve as a reminder of it. Still, most of the film aims to dismiss Communism by depicting it as a laughably incompetent form of government, only successful at terrorizing its people.

Gable gets to play the charming but principled rogue, pretending to be drunk and making witty retorts, ready to get the hell out of Moscow, but not willing to let someone else hang for his actions. Lamar is playing the young idealist who has to learn she bet on the wrong horse, but for a while, she gives as good as she gets with Gable. She has him on the defensive for a decent amount of their interactions.