Movies & TV

I want to nominate an older example, which is all the more insidious because it comes from great German and Austrian Jewish emigre filmmakers who made this anti-Communist garbage in 1939, when you'd think they'd have more urgent enemies to prioritize. The film is Ninotchka, by Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder co-wrote the screenplay, and Greta Garbo stars in the title role. It's a romantic comedy about a White Russian aristocrat (Melvyn Douglas) trying to stop the Soviets from selling his family jewels. He falls for the humorless envoy (Garbo) who arrives to facilitate the sale.

Sally Jane Black, on Letterboxd, has an excellent review that I'll quote at length because the filter won't let me link directly to her profile. At the moment it's the fourth review from the top on this page.

In 1939, Ernst Lubtisch, Billy Wilder, and a handful of other bootlicking hacks made Ninotchka, which paints the Soviet Union as drab, dull, inadequate, patronizing, heartless, loveless, and cold. It might have sometime been cold, I admit. This was, after all, before capitalists had inflicted the level of pollution and destruction that would bring about climate change.

But loveless and heartless? How dare they. To read Marx's words on love is to understand a love greater than any individualistic lie capitalism has produced. To be a communist is to be driven by love for humanity beyond anything a capitalist is capable of. No one who thrives off the work of others while those workers starve is a person who knows love.

Patronizing? This is fundamentally opposed to the proletariat's interests. It is capitalists--who often style themselves as philanthropists--who are patronizing. It is this film that is patronizing in its portrayal of a Soviet woman who speaks to a man in a robotic, monotone, direct manner that is lifeless, as if she is inhuman and must be taught to love.

"Will you smile?" At least it captures bourgeois misogyny.