Comrade X
At the time this film was released, in 1940, World War II had already begun in Europe, but the Soviet Union still had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. In the film, Mac is able to fool a character by pretending to hear news that Germany has broken the pact and launched an invasion of the USSR. Of course, that's exactly what happened the very next year when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in summer 1941.,The script makes reference to the Soviet law that a person could divorce his or her spouse simply by sending them a postcard announcing that the marriage was over - but in 1936, four years before this film was made, Stalin had repealed that law when he rewrote the Russian constitution and made divorces considerably harder to get.,Vanya: The communists have ideas. But they found out you can't run a government with everybody going around having ideas. So what is happening, the communists are being executed so that Communism should succeed.,"RUSSIA. The never never land of steppes, samovars and spies -- beards, bears, bombs and borscht - where almost anything can happen - and usually does. ",Featured in The Miracle of Sound (1940),Funiculi, Funicula
(1880) (uncredited)
Lyrics by Peppino Turco
Music by Luigi Denza
Sung a cappella with modified lyrics by Clark Gable,CLARK GABLE and HEDY LAMARR share the screen in a romantic comedy along the lines of "Ninotchka", which made such a success for Greta Garbo. Obviously, Louis B. Mayer hoped COMRADE X would do for Hedy what the other film did for Garbo's image--and to some extent, it did.

It's not as sophisticated and witty as the Garbo film, but Hedy plays a dedicated Soviet woman who thinks that an American that she is attracted to (CLARK GABLE) shares the same philosophy. FELIX BRESSART is her scatterbrained father, EVE ARDEN is an American newspaper woman and SIG RUMAN is a loyal Nazi foreign correspondent in Russia who is just as confused as everyone else as to the identity of "Comrade X".

It's a good role for Hedy, playing her role very much the way Cyd Charisse played the Russian gal in "Silk Stockings", and with a comic flair that she seldom exhibited in any of her MGM films, even the so-called comedies. Gable is more or less himself as the cynical newspaper man who ends up taking his bride (Lamarr) to America after they've had a few escapades that have the Soviet authorities chasing them all over the hillsides in tanks--the film's most amusing moments.

One of the funniest performances comes from NATASHA LYTESS, as Olga, a secretary who tells Gable she's a spy. Her drunken antics are a highlight (she can't see a thing without her glasses). Lytess was Marilyn Monroe's acting coach for several years, the superstar being dependent on her for her every move during her early films at Fox.,