TCM’s Shadows of Russia: The Lighter Side of Revolution

“I feel a little reactionary,” deadpans Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X, 1940.

On their improbable wedding night, anti-Communist reporter—remember them?—Clark Gable gives Bolshevik Hedy Lamarr a luscious, Adrian designed silk nightgown. Unlike Travis Banton, Adrian was concerned with silhouette and in this exquisitely bias-cut negligee—Gable just happens to have it in his suitcase—Hedy Lamarr’s figure is highlighted to a spectacular effect.

Long live the products of decadent American capitalism.

Capitalist Clark Gable puts Communist Hedy Lamarr in touch with her feminine side in Comrade X, 1940.

Hedy, playing a variation of Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, is a humorless Soviet scold more concerned with industrial production than with her own femininity, which translates into her humanity.

TCM’s Shadows of Russia series, organized and programmed by my favorite  film blogger Self-Styled Siren and The New York Posts’s fine film critic Lou Lumenick, kicks into a refreshing mode—after the shallow and dopey Reds—as we view the lighter side of the Russian revolution.

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