Oldal 301 [301]
American Femininity in Soviet Films during the Early Cold War (1946—1955)
an African American boy Ben Robinson, sending him to death even though his
mother Mary had worked as a housemaid in the Steals" house for twenty years.?
Another personification of cruelty—Mrs. Dodge, a journalist—from They Have
a Motherland (Vladimir Legoshin, Aleksandr Faintsimmer, 1950) was characterised
by a film critic as a “Nazi storm trooper under the guise of a representative of the
free press” (Kokoreva 1950: 31). The question of the primary opponent’s close¬
ness to Nazism occupied a very important place in the propaganda of both of the
main Cold War adversaries. In 1946 Stalin, reacting to Winston Churchill’s Fulton
speech, was already qualifying Nazi race theory as an ideological basis for the idea
of Anglo-Saxon race supremacy (Stalin 1946).* The Russian Question illustrated this
point with Gould’s words: “The Germans made only one mistake: it’s not them but
us, the Anglo-Saxons, who are the highest race”.’ Film criticism also stressed the
proximity of American imperialism to Nazism (Solovev 1951: 22).
One more remarkable trait of American women was the hollowness of their life
goals; as Soviet propaganda emphasised, since bourgeois society did not create op¬
portunities for women’s self-realisation and equality of the sexes, American women
were narrow-minded (Rikhter 1997: 40). Moreover the capitalist system aimed to
narrow women's life goals. Silver Dust ridiculed bourgeois women’s piety as well as
their racist and anti-communist prejudices.
A mercenary spirit was another feature prescribed to American women. One of
the most remarkable American female characters of Soviet Cold War cinema was
Janet Sherwood, whose role was performed by Soviet movie star Lyubov Orlova.
The actress described her heroine as “well-groomed, beautiful, stylish, and at the
same time spiritually empty, without lofty aims, without sincere feelings and affec¬
tions, cold, selfish, ambitious, who believes only in bank accounts and worships
only the dollar” (quoted in Aleksandrov 1976: 297). Indeed the cult of money was
believed to be the most important trait of Americans, both men and women. That
is why commercial gain allegedly was the main reason for marriage for Americans.
For instance, Gould openly told Jessie that he had married a “really unattractive
but very rich woman” only for the money. Inasmuch as marriage has class nature,
individual preferences in love cannot be achieved due to social barriers. The tragedy
of love in a bourgeois society was a recurring theme of Soviet propaganda reflected
in many movies of this period.
In American society as seen by Soviet cinematographers, the role of a love sub¬
stitute was sex. Sexual profligacy served as an important marker to distinguish
> In the Jakobson’s play The Jackals, which underlies the film scenario, Doris expresses a wish to attend
the execution in person (Jakobson 1952: 89).
‘The propagandists actively exploited the legacy of evoking Nazism. One could find analogous ways of
representing the Enemy on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain (Clark 2000: 37).
5 On the role of picturing the ties between US and the Nazis in creating cinematic representations of
American Enemy see Turovskaya 1993: 100.
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