This movie is a piece of fawning, pro-Stalin propaganda. The usual excuse for it, that it reflected patriotic sentiments of the era, can be equally applied to "Triumph of the Will" - there is no excuse for this lying travesty. Fakery follows fakery in this movie - the Ambassador's wife visiting Mrs. Molotov's perfume factory, and declaring the products superior to those of Paris; the Ambassador shaming his properly security-conscious subordinate by declaring it unthinkable that anyone in the Embassy would say anything that they'd be reluctant to say to Stalin's face; the buxom Soviet peasant woman chiding the Ambassador for effete American reluctance to have their women go down the coal mines the way "liberated" Russian women do. And these are only the comic relief. The serious scenes, such as the Moscow show trials, are just beyond pathetic, with the Ambassador commenting that the well-rehearsed confessions of the victims were uncoerced. In its whole-hearted praise of one of the bloodiest tyrants of the twentieth century, this movie is too corrupt and infuriating even to be funny.
Review of Mission to Moscow
