After co-scripting NINOTCHKA, Walter Reisch double-dipped on comic Russians, working up a story for this predictably lousy farce, an exercise in face-planting from director King Vidor (working out of his comfort zone) as well as scripters Ben Hecht & Charles Lederer (who just should have known better).* Clark Gable, wiseguy Moscow reporter working around strict censorship under the byline Comrade X, is being blackmailed by hotel valet Felix Bressart, worried about daughter Hedy Lamarr, too pure a communist to survive long in today’s Russia. Gable’s secret will be safe only if he takes her to America, not that she wants to go. Comic mayhem ensues. That’s the idea, but so poorly planned, paced & peddled, the film mostly stupefies. (You know you’re in trouble when Eve Arden & Sig Ruman can’t buy a laugh.) At least, Hedy looks gorgeous, aping Greta Garbo’s amusing flat vocal deliver from NINOCHTKA, even showing some rare comic energy in a fight with Gable. And Hecht & Lederer show what this might have been with some neat paradoxical speeches early in the third act for rival Soviet apparatchicks Oskar Homolka & Vladimir Sokoloff . Too little, too late.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Stick with Lubitsch & Garbo in NINOCHTKA/’39.
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