Comrade X (1940) on Netflix
American reporter McKinley "Mac" Thompson files critical stories from Moscow as Comrade X. His valet Vanya discovers him and forces him to get Vanya's daughter Golubka out of the Soviet Union.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.6/102,044 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Commissar Vasiliev, chief of the secret police, takes over press censorship in Moscow and bars reporters from leaving the city without permits. McKinley "Mac" Thompson skips the announcement and plays an irresponsible drinker, while quietly sending critical stories abroad as Comrade X. The German reporter Van Hofer claims the room Mac has paid for. At the funeral of Vasiliev's predecessor, Mac photographs an assassin firing at Vasiliev with a camera built into a portable radio, then hides the film. Vanya, Mac's valet, has learned who he is, and demands that Mac smuggle Vanya's daughter Golubka out of the Soviet Union. Golubka drives a streetcar, work reserved for men, so she is called Theodore, and she is a devoted communist whose mentor, Bastakoff, backs a sham marriage that lets her carry communist ideas to America.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Comrade X (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In Comrade X, Clark Gable's character jokes that "Germany just invaded Russia" and that "Panzer tanks are rolling into Ukraine" to get a German reporter thrown out of his room; less than a year after the film's release, Germany did invade Russia and the Ukrainian SSR.
- The UK pulled Comrade X from cinemas. Pre-war American films such as it and Ninotchka showed the Soviet Union as backwards, dreary, depressing and totalitarian, but once the United States entered the war on Russia's side Hollywood's Russians became brave, honorable, freedom-loving liberators.
