“Comrade Karen?”

My wife gazes at me, and she’s like, “Huh?”

“Since I’m watching all these Russian themed movies I feel the need to get in character.”

“Robert…”

“Comrade Robert, if you please.”

My poor wife heaves a weary sigh.

“Comrade Robert, how long will this lunacy continue?”

“Counter-revolutionary! Saboteur! Trotskyite!”

Comrade Karen sternly points to the stairs, and I make my way to a Zhivago-like exile in the living room for the next few hours.

Oh, the sacrifices I make for my comrades at Big Hollywood.

(more…)

This month TCM is running a fascinating series, Shadows of Russia, a history of Russia and the Soviet Union as seen through Hollywood’s lens. If you care about movies and politics, you should check out these movies.

The idea for this series originated with the fine film blogger Self-Styled Siren and the New York Post’s Lou Lumenick. Self-Styled Siren explains how it came about here.

Marlene Dietrich, The Scarlett Empress, 1934.

First up, Josef von Sternberg’s—real name Jonas Sternberg—The Scarlett Empress, 1934, starring Marlene Dietrich as Catherine The Great. Catherine was born to an obscure noblemen of the tiny and dirt poor realm of Anhalt-Zerbst. She was brilliant, precocious and, ah, not too attractive.

Hollywood being Hollywood—thank heavens—rewrites and recasts history in a big way. Marlene Dietrich first appears as an innocent young girl, all blond ringlets—very Shirley Temple. It’s great seeing Dietrich do a virgin: she pouts and poses, melding innocence and nymphomania. (more…)

Actress and author Patsy Ruth Miller.

In 1924 while shooting a film in New York, actress Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995) developed a close friendship with author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Frequently, Fitzgerald and Patsy Ruth would go out for dinner while Zelda remained home pleading fatigue. Patsy Ruth eventually realized that Zelda’s fatigue was acute alcoholism.

Observes Patsy Ruth:

It didn’t seem to me that Scott drank more than most of the men I knew. He seemed intoxicated on words, and sometimes we would sit, our after-dinner coffee growing cold, while Scott tried to make me see some fine point of writing, or understand why an emotion had been ill or well portrayed. But often I had the feeling that he was unsure of himself as a writer, that he was afraid of that one day he’d have nothing left to say, and I also had the impression that Zelda did little to build his confidence, even sometimes, in a perverse way, seemed to enjoy his battle with self-doubt.

Fitzgerald’s agonies of self-doubt are common among writers. The fear of having nothing left to say will, inevitably, be paralyzing. And a non-supportive spouse can act as a fatal poison to a vulnerable writer. Most witnesses observe that Fitzgerald was an alcoholic by the time he attended Princeton. There is no doubt that by the time he landed in Hollywood he was a hopeless drunk. It’s a measure of how common was alcoholism in early Hollywood that Patsy Ruth didn’t think Fitzgerald’s intake was all that unusual. (more…)