The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) on Netflix
The Soviet submarine Sprut runs aground off a New England island. Lieutenant Rozanov leads nine sailors ashore to find a boat to pull it free, and they reach playwright Walt Whittaker's house.
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Trailer
Plot summary
On a September morning, the captain of the Soviet submarine Sprut takes his boat in close to the New England coast for a look at America and runs it aground on a sandbar off Gloucester Island. Rather than risk an international incident, the captain sends nine sailors under Lieutenant Rozanov to find a motor launch. The party reaches the house of Walt Whittaker, a New York playwright packing up his wife Elspeth and their children, Pete and Annie. Rozanov asks about boats, admits they are armed Russians and demands the family's station wagon, leaving Alexei Kolchin to guard them. The sailors take a sedan from postmistress Muriel Everett; her call to switchboard operator Alice Foss spreads rumors across the island, where Police Chief Link Mattocks tries to hold back a militia forming under Fendall Hawkins.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The United States Navy refused to lend a submarine for the production, and the Russian Embassy similarly refused the producers' request for a Soviet one, so The Mirisch Company rented a mockup of a submarine that had been used in the 1965 film Morituri.
- Theodore Bikel won the role of the submarine captain because he pronounced Russian so well; he had taken only a few classes and was not at all fluent in the language.
- Johnny Mandel played Peggy Lee the music for "The Shining Sea" and asked her to "paint a word picture" of what she had heard; her lyrics by coincidence exactly matched the film's beach scene of two lovers, astonishing Mandel, who had not shown her the film.
- Pablo Ferro's main title sequence used the flag's red, white and blue and the Soviet hammer and sickle as transitional elements, zooming into each for a montage, with music alternating between "Yankee Doodle" and the Russian songs "Meadowlands" and "Song of the Volga Boatmen".
- Set on a fictional island off Massachusetts, the film was shot on the coast of Northern California, mainly in Mendocino and Noyo Harbor at Fort Bragg, so the opening dawn scene was actually filmed at dusk through a pink filter.
- Norman Jewison said the film, released at the height of the Cold War, had considerable impact in both Washington and Moscow and was one of the few American films of the time to portray the Russians positively; Senator Ernest Gruening mentioned it in Congress and a copy was screened in the Kremlin.
- Invited to Moscow after getting a visa, Norman Jewison watched a screening at which directors Sergei Bondarchuk and Grigory Chukhray clapped and cried, telling him they wept because they "didn't make it first".
