Hollywood Flashback: In 1966, ‘The Russians Are Coming’ Tackled the Cold War With Comedy

In the 1960s, Hollywood was grappling with how to address the ongoing Cold War embroiling the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Two years after Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove sent up the tension by launching a character out of a plane blissfully straddling a bomb, Norman Jewison’s 1966 comedy The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming took a lighter but still thoughtful approach.

The film offers an empathetic take on a Soviet team searching for a boat after their submarine runs aground on a quiet island off the coast of New England, leading locals to believe the Russians are invading. The movie was a box office success (earning $21.7 million domestically, or $189.9 million today) and a critical hit, and picked up four Oscar nominations including best picture and best actor for Alan Arkin, who made his feature debut as sub leader Lt. Rozanov.

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Jewison had seen Arkin on Broadway and offered him the role of vacationing writer Walt (ultimately played by Carl Reiner), but Arkin turned it down because he didn’t want to be a straight man. Playing Rozanov required a two-month crash course in speaking Russian. “The public opinion was so anti-Russian — not just the government, but the people, too — that we felt we were doing something that was a little bit dangerous, and that issue brought the cast together,” Arkin, now 87, tells The Hollywood Reporter.

According to Jewison, 95, getting Reiner for the film was a done deal once the Dick Van Dyke Show actor learned Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint would portray his character’s wife, Elspeth. “It was the fact that I got Eva Marie Saint that Carl Reiner did the picture because he was so impressed that he was going to be her leading man, and she had done all these films with [Marlon] Brando,” the director says. “He was very, very impressed.”

Saint, 97, calls the film “a very special experience” and attributes its resonance to the public’s continued interest in the “complicated relationship between America and Russia.” She recalls enjoying “many laughs together off-screen” with Reiner, who passed away in June of 2020 at 98. “He was a very funny and dear man who is greatly missed.”

Jewison remembers being aware that the project could be a tricky one to get funded. Luckily, Arthur B. Krim, then-head of United Artists who had been friendly with President John F. Kennedy and also served as finance chairman for the Democratic Party, believed completely in the story that the filmmaker had in mind. “It was a very politically dangerous film for them to put a lot of money into it,” Jewison admits. “[Krim] said, ‘You’ll get certain opposition to this picture and all of that, but don’t worry — I’m behind you.'”

As Jewison recalls, what then became his “biggest problem” in making a movie centered on a submarine was, well, how to get a submarine, especially given the film’s themes. “I found a submarine in Canada that the U.S. Navy had taken from the Germans, and I asked them if I could bring the submarine down from Vancouver, and they said no,” he says. “I said, ‘Well, I’m making this film.’ And they said, ‘What’s the title?’ And I said, ‘The Russians Are Coming.’ And they said, ‘Definitely not.'”

Instead, production designer Robert Boyle constructed a poop deck affixed with a conning tower he found on the Fox Studio Lot, and outboard motor engines were installed underneath. “The only problem with our submarine was, if there were any waves, the submarine would kind of bend in the middle — it wasn’t too stable,” Jewison says with a hearty laugh. “And then the poor guys that were inside the sub, with the engines and the outboard motors and everything, I had to give them oxygen masks because of the fumes.”

Arkin points out that, while its overall message about the universality of the human experience is “incredibly pertinent,” the film was also a product of a different time. “People now have more of a sense that it’s not the people but the government that is the issue,” he says. “I think that the statement of The Russians Are Coming was necessary at the time and still holds true, but maybe a little, tiny bit naive for the present.”

The Toronto-born Jewison, who remembers being called a “Canadian pinko” in the press upon the film’s release, is proud of how widely it was embraced but acknowledges that the moment felt appropriate for satire because of the lack of real-world combat at the time.

“You couldn’t make this film today — not with an idiot like Putin around, and this terrible invasion in Ukraine,” he explains. “It’s not the background for a comedy.”

A version of this story first appeared in the March 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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