Posted on 07/28/2013 11:56:09 AM PDT by ReformationFan
This is a very funny movie and captures (maybe in a not too realistic way) a strange moment in time.
Maybe but consider this exchange:
“Maybe we voted for the wrong man.”
“That couldn’t happen in Russia.”
“They don’t make mistakes.”
“They don’t *vote*.”
Plus the whole sequence where Cagney & Co. have to end up rescuing Otto from the East German police. Not a flattering picture of the commies at all.
If it had been made a decade later after Vietnam and the hippie revolution it probably would’ve been more pro-communist but thankfully it was made when it was.
“I’m just marvy!”
“We will take over West Berlin. We will take over Western Europe. We will bury you!”
“Do me a favor. Bury us but don’t marry us.”
The funniest movie about the USSR hands down is “Comrade X”
starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr
http://viooz.co/movies/19637-comrade-x-1940.html
With all the movies turned into Broadway plays, I always thought this would make for a great Broadway play.
“He said to the police man I shouldn’t be arrested, I should be pitied, because I was a typical bourgeois parasite and the rotten fruit of a corrupt civilization. So naturally, I fell in love with him.”
It’s supposedly based upon a play by Ferenc Molnar.
I love Billy Wilder and his movies.
Sadly, I need a translator for his own peculiar form of English!
I never heard of that movie, but I love Clark Gable, so I’ll check it out.
great film....very funny even thought it’s dated...
Another interesting aside: while Askin, Werner Klemperer and John Banner played Nazis on Hogan’s Heroes, all were Jewish.
I think of it as an historical time capsule for 1961 and some of the major cold war events of the time.
Actually, “Compulsion” on TCM from 2-4 EDT wasn’t bad either - tells the story of the Leopold-Loeb murder case back in the ‘20’s - two supposedly brilliant college students murder a young boy for the thrill of it, and because they’re convinced they’re so smart they’ll get away with it (prototypical leftwingers) - best line was from Orsen Wells playing their lawyer Clarence Darrow - the KKK has burned a cross on his lawn because of his supposedly atheistic beliefs, and the nest morning he is being chided by a bunch of journalists because his clients’ parents are so rich - did he believe in the case or did he take it because he’s going to get paid a lot of money? “To believe that the rich don’t deserve as good a defense as the poor just because they’re rich is to engage in the same kind of thinking that burned that cross”, he snaps.......
If you think Billy Wilder was a communist you’re full of beans.
You respond to a three-year-old post with a bizarre extrapolation such as that??
Frankly, I had no particular thoughts about Wilder. Although, upon looking things up, he was a very ardent opponent of the HUAC and a member of the Committee for the First Amendment.
I didn’t even notice the date. :) You said ‘they snuck things in’. Wilder co wrote and directed the film so who else? As for HUAC, Billy Wilder was a German refugee and didn’t care for government intrusions of that sort. But I just watched this film recently and it makes the communists look even worse than Dr Strangelove did.
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