Cold War Sport, Film and Propaganda. A Comparative Analysis
Cold War Sport, Film and Propaganda. A Comparative Analysis
Cold War Sport, Film and Propaganda. A Comparative Analysis
superpowers
Introduction
“It’s the bell,” says the American television commentator excitedly, “and the war is on.”
As the two boxers enter the final round of what has been a grueling, vicious
encounter, the noise in the Moscow arena is deafening. Each fighter simply must win, as
much for ideological as personal reasons. The giant Russian, Ivan Drago, is the supreme
communist athlete, a robotic brute programmed to kill; the American, Rocky Balboa,
personifies the capitalist rags-to-riches dream, the ghetto underdog made good. As the
pugilists pummel one another to a frenzied climax, and the movie’s rock theme-tune
Moments after his victory, wrapped in a Stars-and-Stripes flag in the ring, Rocky
magnanimously issues a heartfelt plea for peace. “In here there were two guys killin’
each other but I guess that’s better than twenty million,” the American declares. “What
I’m sayin’ is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change.” The film
ends with everyone in the crowd, even the Soviet Politburo, rising to their feet to
applaud.
Ask people today, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about
Cold War sports films and they will invariably speak about this one from 1985, Rocky IV.
We should not be surprised. Rocky IV is, for one thing, younger than most Cold War
films—its director and star, Sylvester Stallone, is still in the film business. Rocky IV was a
bone fide worldwide hit and ranks, in fact, as the biggest-selling Cold War sports film of
all. Nowadays Rocky IV is seen as a classic film of its era, an iconic slice of crude
Reaganite kitsch that sees good triumphing over evil and points to an end to the long-
running East-West conflict. In the movie’s final sequence, described above, the heroic
Rocky not only shows us why the West needs to fight the Cold War but also how it can
win—by challenging Soviet communism on its home soil and appealing to the Russian
Rocky IV may well be the best-known Cold War sports film, but how
representative of that sub-genre is it? Did most other Hollywood sports movies that
focused on the Cold War carry such overtly propagandistic messages? Which particular
sports did American filmmakers tie into the Cold War and which audiences did their
films target? How prominent a theme in Hollywood’s Cold War output was sport
overall? Did the Soviet film industry also deploy sport as a propaganda tool? If so, why
exactly, in what ways and to what effect? What role did the American and Soviet
governments play in determining how the two film industries portrayed sport during the
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Cold War? And what light does any of this shed on the wider subject of sport during the
Cold War or on what scholars have come to call the Cultural Cold War?
This article will address all of these questions. Using a combination of primary
and secondary sources, its aim is to provide the first comparative overview of how the
sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article is divided into
two main sections, the first concentrating on Hollywood and the second on Soviet film.
Each section will start by providing a brief outline of that film industry’s relationship to
the state during the Cold War, the popularity of sports films as a genre, which particular
sports predominated on screen, and what the general trajectory of the films’ ideological
messages was throughout the conflict. The article will then analyze in depth the range of
propaganda styles that American and Soviet sports films adopted and the different
propaganda functions they served. The similarities and differences will be highlighted,
using a selection of representative films in order to provide a sharp focus. The article
closes by assessing what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the
US and Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that
Sport has long been a popular subject in American cinema, dating back even to before
“Hollywood” itself came into being in the 1910s. After 1945, of the many sports
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Americans played and watched, baseball, boxing, auto racing and American football
tended to predominate on the American screen, followed by basketball, ice hockey and
horse racing. Some of these sports featured more highly than others in Cold War films,
as we shall see. Though the majority of Hollywood sports films were melodramas,
biopics or short documentaries, sport also cropped up in comedies, musicals and even
science fiction fantasies. During the Cold War, sports films regularly enjoyed major
commercial success and a few even garnered Academy Awards. In line with this, sports
films were made by or starred some of the biggest names in the American movie
business.1
Unlike its Soviet counterpart, the American film industry was never a
straightforward instrument of the state during the Cold War. As scholars have recently
various US government agencies during the conflict. The Defense Department, Federal
among others, were all able to use Hollywood for recruitment and other propaganda
purposes. Audiences generally knew nothing about this, with the result that the United
States’ reputation for having a free and independent media—an important propaganda
1Demetrius Pearson, Russell L. Curtis, C. Allen Haney and James J. Zhang, “Sport Films:
Social Dimensions Over Time, 1930–1995,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Vol. 27,
2003, pp. 145–161; Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke and Deborah A. Carmichael, eds.,
All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History (Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 2008); Sean Crosson, Sport and Film (London: Routledge, 2013).
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theme in itself during the Cold War—largely remained intact.2 It would be erroneous to
see the hand of government behind each and every Cold War sports film to come out of
Hollywood after 1945, yet there are notable examples—as, again, we shall see—of
more difficult to delineate particular ideological trends in American sports films during
the Cold War compared with Soviet films. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify certain
changes in the political messages that films conveyed across phases of the Cold War and
in their thematic approaches towards the conflict. Sometimes these changes appear to
Hollywood moved to the political right during the Cold War’s early years, then slightly to
the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally back to the right when the former college
footballer and radio show sports presenter Ronald Reagan was in the White House in
the 1980s.
Surprisingly perhaps, not a single U.S. sports film focused explicitly on the Cold
War during the conflict’s formative phase, from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. This
2Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
2007); Lawrence Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in
Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover
Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War (New York: Cornell
University Press, 2012); Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information
Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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period was characterized instead by oblique references to the existential threat that
communism posed to the United States, combined with a cycle of movies that exposed
corruption in American sport. The institutionalization of the Cold War in the United
States in the mid- to late-1950s generally led to a narrowing of views on the conflict on
the big screen. This was the era in which powerful elements within Hollywood,
effectively to sell the virtues of liberal capitalism at home and abroad. Sports films
played only a minor role in this campaign though one or two of them were major box
office hits. Coterminous with films that used sport to advertise the virtues of freedom
and liberty were others that countered what official Cold War propagandists saw as
By the mid-1960s, the US Cold War consensus had started to weaken. As proof of
this, a small number of movies began to satirize what might be called America’s
militarizing American culture. Simultaneously, other films and television series cashed in
on the success of the James Bond franchise by portraying American athletes as smart-
suited spies saving the West from a new enemy, Mao Zedong’s China. By the mid-1970s,
elements within what was termed New Hollywood were launching a full-scale assault on
America’s whole approach to the Cold War—and attacking the nation’s sports culture in
the process. By and large, Hollywood’s sports films then conducted a volte-face in the
1980s. The Cold War was “hot” business again, revitalized by President Ronald Reagan’s
quest to win the conflict outright. Docudramas celebrated Olympic victories over the
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Soviet Union, B features condemned the Eastern bloc for dragooning child gymnasts,
and blockbusters portrayed Americans and Russians brutally fighting each other almost
to the death.
American values, movie historians argue, by mainly focusing on brilliant athletes who
gain from the benefits of a meritocratic, capitalist democracy and by endorsing self-
reliance rather than fundamental societal change as the best response to social
performers” (both in the screen sense and on the field of play), Hollywood has,
suggesting that sport also provides a model for social mobility, writes sports historian
Ron Briley, in which “hard work will prevail in the best traditions of Benjamin Franklin
and Horatio Alger,” Hollywood has played—and continues to play—an important role in
This form of what might be called “soft” propaganda was an integral component
of many US sports films made during the Cold War, its positive, subliminal messages
3 Aaron Baker, Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2006); Ron Briley, “Sports in Film, Television, and History: Introduction,”
Film & History, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2005, pp. 17–18.
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rendered all the more powerful perhaps by falling under most people’s political radar.
Such celluloid propaganda came in a variety of forms. Technicolor musicals like Good
News (1947), about a college footballer in the Roaring Twenties who chooses the
ordinary girl over the snobby vamp, told audiences that, as one of its songs put it, “The
Best Things in Life Are Free.” Biopics like Follow the Sun (1951) celebrated the fame and
fortune of real-life golfers like the Texan Ben Hogan, who, the film shows us, started his
career as a lowly caddy. Melodramas like The Square Jungle (1956) saw down-at-heel
boxers overcome poverty and alcoholism to find success inside and outside the ring.
And dramas like Hoosiers (1986) told nostalgic, feel-good parables about big-city
basketball coaches learning the importance of teamwork and community in 1950s rural
backwaters.4
Where soft propaganda films often carried a slightly more overt political edge
was when sport was tied to stories about the U.S. military. This was particularly the case
during the fifties, when the need to engender a patriotic “team spirit” in the face of
perceived internal and external communist aggression was at its height. Two particularly
interesting examples of this sort of film are The Long Gray Line and Strategic Air
sports movies but each carried a clear message—supported by the U.S. Defense
4Doug McVay, ‘Charles Walters’, Focus on Film, 27, 1977, 30-40; 'The Top Box Office
Hits of 1951', Variety, 2 January 1952; 'The Top Box-Office Hits of 1956', Variety Weekly,
2 January 1957; Ron Briley, ‘Basketball’s Great White Hope and Ronald Reagan’s
America: Hoosiers (1986)’, Film & History, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2005, pp. 12–19.
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Department—about the relationship between sport, family, the military, and traditional
American values.
The Long Gray Line is a paean to the United States’ famous military academy at
West Point, told through the eyes of the real-life Irish boxer-cum-athletic trainer Marty
Maher (played by Tyrone Power). Maher had enjoyed a fifty-year career at West Point
during which, the film shows us, the former dishwasher earned the love and respect of
cadets who rose to the very top of their profession, including the famous general
George Patton and future US president Dwight Eisenhower. Maher’s wife Mary
(Maureen O’Hara) adopts these and other cadets as her children, while Marty teaches
them the codes of honor, patriotism and manliness on the football field and in the
swimming pool. Shot on location at West Point, The Long Gray Line was made by the
acclaimed director John Ford. Best known for his Westerns, Ford was a key figure in the
secret Militant Liberty program run by the Pentagon and CIA in the 1950s. Militant
Liberty sought to sell the United State’s Cold War strategy discreetly, not by aggressive
anti-communist propaganda, but through novels, newspaper stories and movies that
explained “the principles upon which the Free World way of life is based.” The Long
Gray Line also starred another Militant Liberty activist, the actor Ward Bond, who
5Bosley Crowther, “‘Long Gray Line’ Tinted Green; Movie of West Point Honors Irish
Hero,” The New York Times, 11 February 1955, p. 19; Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, pp.
202–205; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold
War (London: Granta, 1999), pp. 284–186.
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Strategic Air Command fuses sport, right-wing patriotism and nuclear
preparedness in a melodrama about a baseball star who decides to put service in the
military above fame and fortune on the diamond. Instigated by the famous actor and US
Air Force reservist, James Stewart, Strategic Air Command casts Stewart as ‘Dutch’
Holland, a St. Louis Cardinals player and former World War II bomber pilot who is
recalled to active duty. Dutch is initially opposed to the military interfering in his life in
what he sees as peacetime but slowly realizes that serving with SAC, the nation’s long-
range nuclear bomber fleet, is far more important than a lucrative career on the sports
field. The film’s narrative is divided between Dutch’s duties as an aircraft commander
and the demands his job places on his marriage. The story culminates in a daring, non-
stop flight from Florida to a U.S. base in Japan, which tests to the full both Holland’s
health and his wife Sally’s loyalties. Strategic Air Command was the sixth highest-
grossing film at the US box office in 1955 and apparently led to a spike in Air Force
enlistments.6
Overall, throughout the Cold War, Hollywood spent little time documenting or depicting
superpower sporting clashes. This might have something to do with the fact that neither
6 Ron Briley, The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011), pp. 12–15, 131–141; Peter Biskind, Seeing is
Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (London:
Pluto, 1983), p. 64–69; Meyers K. Jacobsen, Convair B-36: A Comprehensive History of
America's “Big Stick” (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1997), p. 297–308.
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the Russians nor Chinese played America’s favorite team sports, baseball and football,
and that cinema could not hope to compete with prime-time television’s nationalistic
of American films featuring sport did nonetheless pedal “hard” propaganda, the sort
which demonized communism and told audiences in no uncertain terms that they were
at war. Boxing and, as the Cold War progressed, martial arts featured relatively highly in
this category. Other sports, like football and tennis, also appeared but often in more
Typical of the latter was the use of footballing metaphors in Leo McCarey’s
infamous Red-baiting melodrama from 1952, My Son John. During the McCarthy era,
several movies equated a hatred of sport with a love for communism. McCarey’s film
went one step further by suggesting that sport could inoculate against virtually all forms
of deviance—political, social and sexual. In My Son John, Robert Walker plays John
job in Washington DC to spy for the Soviet Union. Unlike his brothers, two Korean War
heroes who we see enthusiastically throwing a football in an early scene, John preferred
books to sports when he was a child. John’s mother (Helen Hayes) discovers his
treachery and, in a key sequence in which she reminisces about cheering on her other
boys at football, pleads with her son to re-join her “team,” but to no avail; ultimately,
7On U.S. television’s coverage of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, for instance, see
Joshua Lieser, “Los Angeles and the 1984 Olympic Games: Cultural Commodification,
Corporate Sponsorship, and the Cold War,” Ph.D. diss., University of California Riverside,
2014.
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when John sees the error of his ways, he is shot dead by his handlers. For many viewers,
the lesson of the Oscar-nominated My Son John would have been crystal clear—sport
teaches manliness, a love of god and respect for the nation, all things that communism
seeks to destroy.8
By no means all U.S. screen productions portrayed the United States as a passive
target of Cold War espionage. Others showed American secret agents taking the fight to
the opposition and winning what came to be known, significantly perhaps, as the
“spying game.” One of the most popular television espionage series of the mid-1960s
was NBC’s I-Spy. In it, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby played two Pentagon agents who travel
dialogue, I-Spy was a great deal more sober than contemporary programs like The Man
from U.N.C.L.E., with stories invariably focusing on the gritty, ugly side of the espionage
business. Fleet of foot and mind, Culp and Cosby’s characters had no qualms about
killing enemy agents, especially those from Red China. Some episodes of I-Spy focused
explicitly on sport’s role in the Cold War; the pilot episode (“So Long, Patrick Henry”), for
8Glen M. Johnson, “Sharper than an Irish Serpent’s Tooth: Leo McCarey’s ‘My Son
John,’” Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1980, pp. 44–9; Michael Paul
Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley,
CA, 1987), pp. 240–246, 250–53.
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Olympics, an Afro-Asian Games. I-Spy was one of the few U.S. television series of the
things, to think on their feet. This tied in with the theme, promulgated widely by official
U.S. propagandists during the Cold War, that whereas athletes in the West performed
freely and ultimately for themselves, those in the communist world were part of a
“machine” run by the state. This dichotomy served several propaganda functions: it
highlighted the degree of control the Party exerted over people’s lives; it obscured the
sport as a political tool in the Cold War; it devalued communist sporting achievements
by suggesting they were the result of cheating; and it presented communist bloc
athletes as automatons, slaves even, who are forced to win at any cost.
During the 1980s, American filmmakers made good money playing with this
man-versus-machine cliché and with echoing Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire rhetoric in the
television initially but then at cinemas, that narrated the U.S. ice-hockey team’s
improbable victory over the Soviet Union at the Lake Placid Olympics of 1980. Later
9Mark Cushman, I Spy: A History and Episode Guide to the Groundbreaking Television
Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007); Russ Crawford, The Use of Sports to Promote
the American Way of Life during the Cold War: Cultural Propaganda, 1945–1963 (New
York: Edwin Mellen, 2008), pp. 286–292.
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voted the “Top Sports Moment of the 20th Century” by U.S. magazine Sports Illustrated,
the American team’s defeat of the perennial gold medalists at Lake Placid was at the
time depicted in classic David-versus-Goliath terms by the U.S. media. Miracle on Ice in
particular took great pleasure in accentuating the differences in age, experience, status,
training facilities and state support between the rival teams, with one referred to as “a
Nadia, a less well known production from 1984, was a biopic of Romanian Nadia
Comaneci, who was famous for being the first female gymnast to score a perfect 10 at
the Olympics, in Montreal in 1976 when just 14 years of age. Nadia was filmed in
Yugoslavia and showed the enormous physical and mental pressures that communist
released in 1986, saw the Belgian action actor Jean-Claude Van Damme playing a former
Russian martial arts champion who is working as an enforcer for a crime syndicate on
the U.S. West coast. The bullying Russian is finally put spectacularly in his place by a
10 Miracle On Ice, 3 July 2015. This 1980 sporting event has attracted considerable
academic interest. See, for instance, Mary G. McDonald, “‘Miraculous’ Masculinity
Meets Militarization: Narrating the 1980 USSR-USA Men’s Olympic Ice Hockey match
and Cold War Politics,” in Stephen Wagg and David L. Andrews, eds., East Plays West:
Sport and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 222–234; Chad Seifried, “An
Exploration Into Melodrama and Sport: The ‘Miracle on Ice’ and the Cold War Lens,”
Olympika, Vol. 19, 2010, pp. 111–138. On a post-Cold War Hollywood version of this ice-
hockey game, Miracle (2004), see Michael Silk, Bryan Bracey and Mark Falcous,
“Performing America’s Past: Cold War Fantasies in a Perpetual State of War,” in Wagg
and Andrews, eds., East Plays West, pp. 289–313 and M. Silk, J. Schultz, and B. Bracey,
“From Mice to Men: Miracle, Mythology & the Magic Kingdom,” Sport in Society, Vol.
11, No. 2–3, pp. 279–297.
11 “Kell,” “Nadia,” Variety, 16 May 1984, pp. 31, 32.
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talented young karate student and Bruce Lee fanatic from Seattle.12 Streets of Gold, a
more thoughtful drama that also appeared in 1986, told the tale of a retired Russian
boxer who when he was younger was barred from the Soviet national team for being
Jewish. After moving to the US, the boxer trains two young amateur fighters, and the
film culminates in one of them defeating the European champion, a burly Russian. 13
Of all of Hollywood’s 1980s Cold War films, Rocky IV was the most direct in its
confrontation. In it, the Soviet boxer, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), personifies the
steroids who has been computer programmed to handle every ring situation (apart from
the American spirit). In contrast, the warm-hearted Rocky (Stallone) eschews technology
and trains by felling trees and running to the top of the Ural Mountains. Pre-bout press
conferences are excuses for Cold War shouting matches over whether communism or
effects and songs such as “Living in America” all underline what is at stake. Little wonder
critics called Rocky IV the most strident piece of anti-Soviet propaganda of the Reagan
era (in whatever medium), nor that the movie was publicly denounced by Soviet cultural
12 Patrick Goldstein, “Movie Review: No Rhyme, No Reason In ‘No Retreat,’” Los Angeles
Times, 6 May 1986.
13 “Brit,” “Streets of Gold,” Variety, 12 November 1986, p. 14.
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officials.14 Helped by a huge budget of $28 million, Rocky IV turned out to be one of the
highest grossing of all U.S. films that focused explicitly on the Cold War and one of the
eye on overseas audiences than their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. This
reflected Hollywood’s global reach, the profitability of external markets, and advice
from the State Department on how films could best serve U.S. interests. Sports films,
with their emphasis on action rather than dialogue, were naturally seen as products that
could easily crisscross national boundaries and might even penetrate the Iron Curtain.
Rocky IV is a good example of this, with VHS copies of the movie fetching high prices on
the Soviet black market. Decades earlier, the most famous American Olympian of the
1920s, the swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, had achieved cult status on Soviet screens as
14 Philip Taubman, “Societ [sic] Pans ‘Rocky’ and ‘Rambo’ Films,” The New York Times, 4
January 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/04/world/societ-pans-rocky-and-
rambo-films.html .
15 William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 218–222. Rocky IV made $300 million worldwide and
was the most profitable film in the Rocky series. In July 2015, Box Office Mojo listed
Rocky IV as the highest-grossing boxing film ever and, after The Blind Side (2009), the
second highest grossing sports drama ever. Due to inflation, it is very difficult to say
which particular Cold War movie made the most money but one of them has to be
Rambo: First Blood Part II, which also made in excess of $300 million, was released in
1985 and starred Sylvester Stallone.
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Hollywood’s Tarzan. Even Josef Stalin was a secret admirer, though, unlike many Soviet
As popular as Rocky and Tarzan were, neither could help much with what
American diplomats consistently identified as the U.S.’s biggest image problem during
the Cold War, race.17 Soviet cinema found numerous ways of proving to audiences,
especially in the developing world, that African-Americans were treated little better
than slaves and consequently that Washington’s claim to be a beacon of equality and
progress was phony.18 It is in this light that we ought to view a spate of American films
from the 1950s and 1960s that showed African American athletes making it to the very
top of their sport and which thereby indicated that the U.S. was a level playing field
politically and socially. None of these films were blockbusters but, collectively, they
might have helped offset communist allegations that the U.S. was inherently racist.
Pride of place among these films must be taken by The Jackie Robinson Story,
produced by Jewel Pictures and released in 1950. Another biopic, this time about the
man who famously broke the baseball color line when he started for the Brooklyn
16 Frederick H. White, “Tarzan in the Soviet Union: British Lord, American Movie Idol and
Soviet Counterculture Figure,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2015,
pp. 64–85.
17 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
[Serebristaia pyl] (1953) and Harlem, USA ( 1952). Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, pp. 171–
174; Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and
Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010),
pp. 46–47, 73.
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Dodgers in April 1947 and who went on to become one of the biggest baseball stars of
all time, The Jackie Robinson Story is an uplifting story of racial integration and African-
American advancement. Robinson, unusually, plays himself in the film, and is shown
effectively being guided to success and prosperity first by the U.S. Army and then by an
innovative white baseball executive, Branch Rickey. The movie ends, significantly, with
Robinson re-enacting his controversial testimony before the House Committee on Un-
American Activities in July 1949, in which he had said that “democracy works for those
willing to fight for it” and which was widely interpreted as a response to the entertainer
and former All-American football player Paul Robeson’s recent statement that black
Americans would not support the United States in a war with the Soviet Union due to
their continued second-class citizen status under U.S. law. The Jackie Robinson Story
performed well at the box office and reviewers placed the film squarely within the
ideology of the post-World War II liberal consensus, one that saw racial prejudice being
tamed by sustained economic growth and American pluralism. One prominent African
American newspaper, The Chicago Defender, hailed The Jackie Robinson Story as a
Two feature films appeared in the early 1950s centered on and starring the
famed African American basketball outfit, the Harlem Globetrotters. Both movies
19Briley, Baseball Film, pp. 12–15, 57-74; Damion Thomas, “Playing the ‘Race Card:’ US
Foreign Policy and the Integration of Sports,” in Wagg and Andrews, eds., East Plays
West, pp. 207–221; Alessandro Raengo, “A Necessary Signifier: The Adaptation of
Robinson’s Body-image in ‘The Jackie Robinson Story,’” Adaptation, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp.
79–105.
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presented the Globetrotters, a team formed years earlier because U.S. professional
basketball was (until 1950) restricted to whites, as less a symbol of racial segregation
and more as one of the wonderful opportunities that existed for minorities in American
society. Go, Man, Go!, a drama released by United Artists in 1954, is an inspirational
story of the Globetrotters’ rise to stardom, from playing in farmers’ barns for a pittance
to headlining in the biggest stadia in the U.S. Akin to The Jackie Robinson Story, the film
highlights the role that a white man, Abe Saperstein (Dane Clark), plays in helping the
black athletes get the recognition they deserve, and dazzles viewers with exciting, real-
life sports footage. Go, Man, Go! shows the deep friendship that develops between the
Jewish Saperstein and one of the basketballers, played by future civil rights activist and
“noble Negro” Sidney Poitier, as the two men climb the sporting and social ladder. The
movie climaxes with the Globetrotters winning a national tournament by beating an all-
Columbia Studios in 1951. Its narrative focused on a bright, athletically talented college
student, Billy Townshend (Billy Brown), who is torn between joining the Globetrotters
and continuing his education. “One of the finest sport pictures ever produced,” one
trade paper called The Harlem Globetrotters; “It should be noted that no attempt is
made to bring in any mention of race prejudice,” wrote another, “it's simply a story of a
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great team with fine traditions.”21 The State Department enthusiastically supported
French West Indies for the U.S. Information Services, the forerunner to the U.S.
Information Agency, felt the movie’s portrayal of the African American athletes as “well-
dressed, well-paid, and well-fed Americans whose skill is admired by Negro and white
fans alike” would enlighten members of the local population who had been led astray by
Other USIS officials argued that a scene in which a white professor tries to persuade Billy
Townshend to stick to his studies “demonstrates the fact that Negroes are welcome in
American universities and that excellent career opportunities await them upon
graduation.” Other scenes that featured Townshend meeting his wife in an integrated
hotel lobby and his being paid a $1,000-monthly salary were visual images that, officials
“American negro.”22
By the late 1950s, the USIA had grown extremely adept at turning out artistic,
films and, if cleverly put together, could transmit the required ideological messages
quicker and more effectively. Notable examples of this form of celluloid propaganda
21 Harrison’s Reports, 20 October 1951, p. 168; Motion Picture Herald Picture Digest, 27
October 1951, 1074.
22 Damion Thomas, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics
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include Althea Gibson - Tennis Champion (1957), about the first person of color to win a
Grand Slam tennis title, and Wilma Rudolph—Olympic Champion (1961), about the
sprinter who overcame infantile paralysis to become the fastest woman on earth.
Another Olympic gold medalist, the hurdler Hayes Jones, was the subject of One Man—
Hayes Jones (1968), a film that focuses on his recent appointment as commissioner of
recreation in New York City, where he supervised the administration of eight hundred
parks. In Press Conference USA—Arthur Ashe (1975), the first black man to win a tennis
title at Wimbledon and a civil rights activist, talks about professional sport and the black
athlete. 23 Not every USIA sports film designed for Cold War purposes focused on
African-Americans. Old Young Man (1968) presented 24-year-old white basketball star,
Rhodes Scholar and future U.S. senator, Bill Bradley, as a symbol of American pluralism,
idealism and compassion as the cameras focused on his outreach work in the slums of
New York. Old Young Man was translated into dozens of languages, with copies
dispatched to U.S. diplomatic posts in places like Ankara and Katmandu, Rangoon and
23 Donald Roe, “The USIA Motion Picture Collection and African American History: A
Reference Review,” Federal Records and African American History, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1997;
Melinda M. Schwenk-Borrell, “Selling Democracy: The US Information Agency’s
Portrayal of American Race Relations 1953–1976,” Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 2004, pp. 100–134, 168–170.
24 Associated Press, “Cold War Film Gave Bradley a Bit Part in US Propaganda,” Lubbock
21
Dissent
To a greater extent than is often realized, Hollywood supported the U.S. government’s
line during the Cold War. This had less to do with political pressures or official subsidies,
and more with the fact that most people in what was, after all, a film industry, shared
officialdom’s ideological worldview; their relationship was one based, in essence, on the
need to protect capitalism. Notwithstanding this, films were made that deviated from
Cold War orthodoxy, including some about or involving sport. Some of these films used
sport to mildly criticize prevailing views on the Cold War, others to confront those views
head-on.
The start of the Cold War in the late 1940s coincided with a flurry of scandals in
American sport, most centered on bribery and corruption. Despite the pressures on
Hollywood to project positive images of the American Way of Life during this period,
filmmakers could not simply ignore or bury these scandals on grounds of national
interest. Some filmmakers had in fact shifted markedly to the left during the Great
Depression and World War II and were inclined to link sleaze in sport to wider problems
of corruption and inequality within U.S. society.25 The result was an unprecedented
cinematic probe (investigation would be going too far) into how money, greed and sport
interrelated in a land of unfettered capitalism. Movies like Body and Soul (1947),
25Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund. The
Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1979).
22
Champion (1949) and The Set-Up (1949) poured scorn on the sordid side of the boxing
business; The Big Fix (1947) drew attention to gambling rings connected to basketball;
Under My Skin (1950), which was based on an Ernest Hemingway story, implied that
horse racing was riven with corruption; White Lightning (1953) cast a withering eye over
bribery and gambling in many Americans’ favorite winter sport, ice hockey. 26
It was a coming-of-age drama that looked at the cold business of subsidizing (and
exploiting) college footballers that was probably the most radical—and certainly the
most controversial—of these films. Written by former Communist Party member Sidney
Derek) who wins a scholarship at an exclusive Southern university and whose grades are
win a series of lucrative wagers on games. The movie’s political edge would have been
harder had Hollywood’s censorship board, the Production Code Administration, not
depiction of class differences in the U.S.27 In the event, many in football and the press
were infuriated by the film’s denigration of sport and capitalism, feelings that were
26 Briley, Baseball Film, p. 11; review of The Big Fix, Film Daily, 9 May 1947, p. 8; review
of Under My Skin, Motion Picture Herald Digest, 11 March 1953, p. 221; review of White
Lightning, Motion Picture Herald Digest, 7 March 1953, p. 1751.
27 E. G. Dougherty to Harry Cohn, 3 March 1950, Saturday’s Hero, Production Code
Administration Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, USA. On how the Production
Code Administration and the censorship of Hollywood movies operated during this era
see Matthew Bernstein (ed.), Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the
Studio Era (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002) and Thomas Doherty,
Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007).
23
heightened by Saturday’s Hero’s release coinciding with the uncovering of a “cribbing
scandal” at West Point in which tutors had been found to be giving footballing cadets
undue help in exams. As a result, a U.S. senator, William Fulbright, the author of a
endorsed Saturday’s Hero’s message, while right-wingers picketed theatres showing the
film on the grounds that it was subversive propaganda. HUAC later found Buchman
industry. As a result, Buchman spent most of the fifties on the industry blacklist.28
In the 1960s, perhaps because it was safer politically, films often used satire
rather than drama to critique the connections between sport and the Cold War. The
best-known example of this has to be Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about nuclear
annihilation, Dr. Strangelove (1964). Kubrick’s acclaimed masterpiece turned the visual
and verbal metaphors used to link sport and national defense in earlier movies like
Strategic Air Command on their head. In Dr. Strangelove, we see gung-ho politicians and
military chiefs using language suffused with sports metaphors, as if World War III were
merely a game. The status board in the giant White House War Room, for instance, is
called the “Big Board” in the manner of sports scoreboards. Dropping bombs is referred
to as ‘scoring’ and a rescue ship as “TD” [touchdown]. When Major “King” Kong (Slim
Pickens) delivers a motivational speech to his B52 crew just before destroying the world,
28Crawford, Use of Sports, pp. 166–173; “Saturday’s Hero,” American Film Institute
Catalog, http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=53423;
Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, pp. 382-383.
24
the pilot sounds just like a football coach prepping his team for the big game; when he
rides the bomb down to his target at the very end of the film, he whoops like a rodeo
cowboy. Phallic images of bombers copulating with tankers in the sky to the strains of
“Try A Little Tenderness” and General Ripper’s fear of communist subversion via “vital
bodily fluids” suggest a clear link between sex, war, threatened masculinity and sport.29
Though it was more of a light-hearted spoof than a black comedy, John Goldfarb,
Please Come Home! (1965) also had something important to say about the US national
security state’s incestuous relationship with sport. John Goldfarb was inspired by the
diplomatic crisis caused by the Soviet Union’s downing of an American U2 spy plane in
May 1960, flown by CIA operative Gary Powers. In the film, U2 pilot John “Wrong-Way”
Goldfarb (Richard Crenna), a former college football star who once ran 95 yards for a
touchdown in the wrong direction, crash lands in the mythical oil-rich Arab kingdom of
Fawzia en route to spying over the USSR. Goldfarb ends up in the middle of a tug-of-war
between Fawzia’s baffoonish leader (Peter Ustinov), who threatens to hand him over to
Moscow unless he agrees to coach the Fawz University football team, and the State
Department, which wants to use the footballer as a bargaining chip in order to secure
Fawzia as a valuable strategic base in the Middle East. Eventually, the State Department
dispatches a football team from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to Fawzia for
an exhibition game, with instructions to lose to Fawz University, and with farcical
results. John Goldfarb’s slapstick humor fell far short of its potential, but the film was
29Peter Kramer, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(London: British Film Institute, 2014); Crawford, Use of Sports, p. 30–35.
25
saved from obscurity due to publicity generated by an unsuccessful lawsuit brought
against the producers by the University of Notre Dame, which objected to a scene
America’s warlike sporting culture. These included two dystopian science fiction
productions: Death Race 2000 (1975), about a murderous trans-American road rally, and
Rollerball (1975), set around an ultra-violent sport akin to roller derby that is run by a
string of global corporations and which has been designed to replace team sports and
warfare.31 A very different sort of film, Drive, He Said (1971), was an off-beat, small-
was aimed at young audiences, was fuelled by the anxieties surrounding the Vietnam
30 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: ‘John Goldfarb’ Arrives: Miss MacLaine Stars in
Disputed Film,” The New York Times, 25 March 1965,
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D03E5DA153CE733A25756C2A9659C946
491D6CF.
31 Vincent Canby, “Futuristic World of ‘Rollerball,’” The New York Times, 26 June 1975,
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A01EFDD103CE034BC4E51DFB066838E6
69EDE; Richard Combs, ‘Death Race 2000’, Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1976, pp.
26–27.
32 Vincent Canby, “Screen: Nicholson's ‘Drive, He Said’: Movie Marks Actor's Debut as
Director Tale of College Athlete Opens at Tower East,” The New York Times, 14 June
1971,
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=950DE6DF1E3FE63ABC4C52DFB066838A6
69EDE.
26
The film that arguably surpassed all others in its condemnation of America’s Cold
War military-sports complex, however, and the final movie therefore to be dealt with
here, is the powerful, Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds. Directed by
Peter Davis, a provocative tele-journalist who in 1971 had exposed the US Defense
Department’s propaganda activities in Selling the Pentagon, Hearts and Minds was not a
footage, telecasts and old movie clips, with no narration—on how the United States had
got embroiled in the Vietnam War. One of the chief, underlying reasons for this, Hearts
and Minds posits, is that the Cold War had bred a sinister cult of victory in the United
States. At the core of this victory culture was the interrelationship between militarism
and sport.
Hearts and Minds points an accusing finger at the military-sports nexus in several
ways that, like the movie as a whole, rely on the viewer to connect the thematic dots. In
one scene, we see a U.S. colonel praising his young men for being “a bloody good bunch
the eve of a big game about god, manliness and love of one’s country. In another scene,
a frenzied college football coach exhorts his young charges not to lose and to “kill the
George Coker, justifies the United States’ actions in Southeast Asia by citing his old high-
school sports coach—“when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Shots of
hysterical cheerleaders and grunting, helmeted footballers show us how American sport
has conditioned its youth to resort to arms instinctively and to win at all costs.
27
Hollywood had played its part in this fashioning this gung-ho, macho culture too, the
melodrama My Son John. On its release, Hearts and Minds was called everything from
“brave and brilliant” to “a cinematic lie.” It is now widely regarded as the definitive
American and Soviet films have much more in common than is usually supposed, but it
The most important are that Hollywood, as the global juggernaut in filmmaking after
World War II, produced many more movies than did its Soviet counterpart, and that
pronounced imbalance is even greater in the case of sports cinema, because the sports
The Soviet Union’s quest for sporting dominance during the Cold War may have
implied to Westerners that Soviet citizens were as obsessed with sports as they were. In
fact, as the leading historian of Soviet sports, Robert Edelman, has noted “There was
always far less attention to spectator sports in the USSR than in the West—fewer
33Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, pp. 238–249; Kurt Kemper, College Football and
American Culture in the Cold War Era (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009),
pp. 2, 6, 22–26, 200–201.
28
games, fewer teams, fewer stadiums, fewer sports, fewer newspapers, less television
coverage, and much less advertising.”34 This was true of the feature film as well. Unlike
in the US, the Soviet sport film was not born until the mid-1930s, but even then only a
few such films were made. The most notable among these was the successful soccer
comedy The Goalkeeper (Vratar, 1936). This is a precursor to the Cold War sports film,
featuring a match between the noble sportsmen of the Soviet team and the “Black
interesting example from the thirties is a beautifully filmed drama about a female track
star, who has to temporarily suspend sporting competition for motherhood, A Chance
Encounter (Sluchanaia vstrecha, 1936).36 Although Soviet studios made several dozen
sports films after World War II, as we shall see, they failed to produce any blockbusters.
34 Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 240.
35 For analyses of this film, which was directed by Semyon Timoshenko, see John
Haynes, “Film as Political Football: ‘The Goalkeeper’ (1936),” Studies in Russian and
Soviet Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2007), pp. 283–97; Andrei Apostolov, “The Enemy at the
Gate: The Soviet Goalkeeper in Cinema, Culture, and Policy,” Studies in Russian and
Soviet Cinema Vol. 8, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 200–7. Mike O’Mahony, Sport in the
USSR: Physical Culture—Visual Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 141–42,
compares the film to paintings of the period.
36 A Chance Encounter, directed by Igor Savchenko, ran into censorship trouble, in part
because of the negative portrayal of the runner’s erstwhile coach and, soon, husband.
See Julian Graffy, “‘An Unpretentious Picture?’—Igor Savchenko’s ‘A Chance
Encounter,’” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2012), pp. 301–18.
Susan Grant also discusses this film in her book Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet
Society: Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s (New
York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 86–90. Our thanks to Dr. Grant for loaning us a copy of the
film, which is not available online.
29
In the USSR, in contrast to the United States, sports films were mainly low-
budget pictures made by and featuring second-tier directors and actors. With few
exceptions, they can be considered the Soviet equivalent of the Hollywood B picture.
Sports films rarely enjoyed any reviews at all in the major organs of the cinema press—
Art of the Cinema (Iskusstvo kino) and Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran)—or positive
critical attention. Sports films almost never recorded significant audience attendance
(the Soviet equivalent of “box office”). The Goalkeeper aside, they are not included in
historical surveys of Soviet film, whether written by Russian or Western scholars, and
subsequently have been largely forgotten.37 In short, sports films appear to have made
This presents us with a problem. Given that sports films were for the most part
marginal in Soviet cinema, can they nevertheless reveal anything important and new
about the way the Soviet state employed its film industry during the Cultural Cold War?
To what extent do these sports films reinforce—or challenge—state rhetoric about the
role of sport in Soviet society during the Cold War? In order to answer these two
the American and Soviet cinemas reflects the profound ideological differences between
37A good example is the relatively recent and highly authoritative history by L.M.
Budiak, Istoriia otechestvennogo kino (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2005). The
Goalkeeper receives three paragraphs, pp. 290–91. The only other sports films
mentioned are Sporting Honor (p. 357) and Sport, Sport, Sport (p. 449).
30
the two systems they were part of. Hollywood may have been influenced by the state,
but Soviet cinema was owned by the state, a process that started in 1919 and was
completed in the mid-1930s.38 Over the life of the Soviet Union, cinema played a highly
significant propaganda function (although that was not the only function it performed)
and was subjected to central planning and varying degrees of political and artistic
censorship.39
The state invested heavily in the film industry during World War II and achieved
remarkable successes given the dire circumstances.40 Afterwards, however, the situation
for Soviet filmmakers soon became even worse than it had been in the late 1930s during
the Great Terror.41 Scarce economic resources were parceled out according to a
hierarchy of need. Even though film was considered, as Lenin had famously put it, “the
most important of the arts,” movies were a low priority compared with the need to
rebuild the USSR’s devastated industrial infrastructure at a time of Cold War. Stalin
therefore urged directors to make fewer but better films, but it is doubtful that even he
38 The institutional history of the early Soviet film industry is the subject of Denise J.
Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).
39 A good overview of the development of Soviet film censorship can be found in Jamie
Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010),
ch. 2.
40 See Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005
showed how Soviet cinema might have developed had it been left to the filmmakers:
The First Glove (Pervaia perchatka), a musical comedy about a boxer from Siberia who
struggles to become a champion, and Center of Attack (Tsentr napadeniia), about a
famous soccer player who abandons his successful sports career to do “something
useful” as an engineer.
31
expected production to drop as precipitously as it did, to only nine films in 1951.42
Hard-core Cold War films like Meeting on the Elbe (Vstrecha na Elbe, 1949) enjoyed
heavy investment and achieved significant box office success with Soviet audiences,
who like all filmgoers appreciated entertaining stories, high production values, and big
name stars.43 The return of draconian censorship after the end of the war, coupled with
against “cosmopolitan” artists, made it difficult for any film director to challenge the
role that the international political melodrama played in Cold War cinematic politics. 44
This was, however, also a period in which the regime sought to convince the populace
that life had returned to a happy “normal,” and the sports film could help reinforce this
fantasy by showing smiling and fit young people having fun, not to mention winning a
As was the case in the United States, Soviet sport film directors’ approach to the
Cold War tended to be “soft.” To a greater extent than in the Unites States, Soviet
cinema generally shied away from direct rhetorical engagement with the ideological
enemy, even when state rhetoric was at its harshest—as in the late Stalin and late
Brezhnev eras. It is true that international sports competition was a motivating factor in
most Soviet films about sport, but that competition was constructed generically as
“Western,” very rarely specifically American. Foreign competitors in Soviet sports films
32
were occasionally shown engaging in a dirty trick or two, but for the most part the
emphasis was not on the negative attributes of the competition. Rather, it was on the
superb training, sterling moral character, and selfless motivation of Soviet athletes,
compared to American films is that the coach is invariably the second lead, and
sometimes even takes the leading role, a reflection, perhaps, of the socialist mentor
the Soviets sought to develop team sports at the expense of individual sports and
therefore focused on team heroes as opposed to individual stars. Certainly, there were
many Soviet films about team sports, mostly soccer, the most popular Soviet spectator
sport, and especially in the early films, the importance of teamwork was emphasized.
skiing, running, auto racing, horse racing, dressage, and mountaineering. Yet like their
Hollywood counterparts, even the films on team sports emphasize the individual, the
star athlete.
45 Thanks to Olga Klimova for this observation, email to authors, 14 August 2015.
33
In the early years of Soviet Cold War sport cinema, competitive sports and the intensive
and fun. The few films about sports from the end of World War II to de-Stalinization in
return to “normal” life after the war. They stress the joys of sports and the
They are “socialist realist” in style and content, even after Stalin’s death, meaning that
they are straightforward and uplifting, with all conflicts successfully resolved by film’s
end.
The master plot of these films is that an inspirational coach takes a talented but
immature athlete (usually a young man) and teaches him the Soviet values of hard work
and discipline. This young man often has been “discovered” by talent scouts on a
collective farm or elsewhere in the provinces and is brought to the “center” (Moscow or
Leningrad) to train. (In this way, like in many Hollywood movies, sport is constructed as
winning, but victory is almost always the result, the implicit message being that the
superiority of Soviet values leads to sporting triumph. This is, of course, virtually
One of the most entertaining early comedies, The Reserve Player (Zapasnoi igrok,
1954), is a musical tale of the triumph of a lesser talent over an acknowledged star in
34
soccer, “the noblest people’s sport,” as the film tells us.46 Eventually the arrogant
champion sees the error of his egocentrism and shirking ways, and the hardworking
“reserve player,” who is substituted for the goalkeeper, saves the game. Another
example of a talented sportsman who goes astray due to his ego can be found in
Champion of the World (Chempion mira, 1954), about a Greco-Roman wrestler, a rural
blacksmith on a collective farm, who is overly reliant on his natural physical talent and
reluctant to train until he is saved by his kindly coach and an understanding girlfriend.
Good-natured and light-hearted films like these were popular, providing a relief from
the bombastic biopics and combat epics that had dominated Soviet screens since the
Second World War. Champion of the World, for example, took twelfth place at the box
office in 1955, with 28.21 million viewers.47 It is important to note that although both of
46 This film was directed by Semyon Timoshenko, who also made The Goalkeeper.
Although unknown in the West except to specialists in Soviet cinema, Timoshenko, a
leading director of comedies, is an exception to the rule that only lesser directors took
on sports film assignments in the USSR.
47 Sergei Zemlianukhin and Miroslava Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoe
kino, 1918-1996 (Moscow: Dubl-D, 1996), p. 490. Although emphasis on the lighthearted
elements of sport is, ironically, most clearly connected to the harshest stages the Cold
War, the sport comedy made occasional appearances in the years that followed. The
Queen’s Regatta [Korolevskaia regatta] (1966) is an entertaining fairy tale that focuses
on a team of cheerful slackers who, despite an incompetent coach, manage to pull
together to win an international competition. The Center from the Heavens [Tsentrovoi
iz podnebesia] (1975) is a loopy basketball comedy about an amazingly tall shepherd
from the Caucasus recruited to play. His interest in playing competitive basketball is to
allow him to travel around the country in pursuit of a Soviet pop singer with whom he
has fallen in love, but he ends up as the team hero who sink the winning basket in a
tight match against an American team. It is important to note, however, that neither of
these two films emphasizes sport’s transforming character in the way the earlier
comedies did.
35
these films were made after Stalin’s death, they still very much reflect the Stalinist
comedic style.
The cultural thaw of the Khrushchev era that began in cinema in 1957 with The
Cranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli) was not friendly to the sport film, as directors had
many more intellectually stimulating artistic issues to deal with and more freedom to
follow their own inclinations.48 There were, however, a few exceptions. The Hockey
Players (Khokkeisty, 1965), the first Soviet feature film about ice hockey, is a serious film
that shows the impact of intense training on the private life of players, especially as they
get older, as well as rivalries within the sporting establishment.49 Another sports film
that reflects Thaw era values is The New Girl (Novenkaia, 1968), about a talented
gymnast who is more interested in being nice to her teammates than in competing
were it to be widely adopted. The girl’s lack of ego and humanity sets her apart from
More characteristic of the Soviet Cold War sports film—and more entertaining—
is Goal! Another Goal! (Udar! Eshche udar! 1968). This is a soccer film that reflects Thaw
stylistics while incorporating socialist realist themes. The star of the “Dawn” team is the
adopted son of the coach, a World War II hero and former champion soccer player. The
48 On the Thaw in cinema, see Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). Woll does not include any sports films in her analysis of the
period.
49 This film is discussed in Andrei Apostolov, “Passivnaia passionarnost: Zritel i media v
36
film projects the construction of Soviet sporting values very explicitly, starting at the
beginning. The film opens at a press conference after an international match that the
Soviets have won. The Western reporters challenge the coach to comment on charges
that his players are to all intents and purposes professionals, to which he replies that
the only professional on the team is himself. (How can “players” be “professionals”?)
Indeed his son Sergei, an orphan from the wartime Leningrad blockade, is studying
physics at university. Interestingly, we see later that Sergei’s professors are not
sympathetic to his attempts to combine “serious work” like physics with competitive
soccer, and are especially unhappy with the amount of time he devotes to his sport. In
the end—and this is presented as the right choice—Sergei decides to focus on soccer,
leading the Soviet team to a tie with the West Germans, who play dirty, picking fights on
the field and faking injuries. The generational conflict between father and son, in which
the boy resents his father/coach’s guidance, is very characteristic of the humanism of
Thaw pictures, but in this case the values of the father, who upholds Soviet traditions,
triumph.50
Although Leonid Brezhnev came to power in late 1964, the Thaw in cinema
lasted until 1968, when the Soviet government began to ban films once again.51
Brezhnev, like Stalin, did not care for artistically innovative or intellectually challenging
films, but his reign marked a shift to social criticism in a number of genres, including the
50 The film’s flashback to a soccer game played in blockaded Leningrad on 2 May 1942,
the traditional starting date for the summer sports season, is particularly interesting
because it reflects a real event. See Edelman, Serious Fun, p. 82.
51 Woll, Real Images, part 5.
37
sports film. A wider variety of sports were featured in these films, many of which share
A new master plot dominated the 1970s: talented Soviet athletes have lost their
lust for victory and their willingness to train hard.52 A dedicated coach needs to drag the
athletes to success by berating them for their selfishness, especially their desire to stay
out late at night dancing to Western pop music or to focus on their private lives. Wives
and girlfriends are seen as particularly invidious distractions. Sports, in short, are no
longer fun; success at the international level requires a complete break with the
pleasures of private life. Winning one for the team is apparently no longer a sufficient
Blue Ice (Goluboi led, 1969) is notable because it was the first film to critique
openly the arduous training regimen for world-class Soviet athletes, in this case ice
dancers. A husband and wife team split over the pressures of training, with the wife
seeking a more normal, less stressful life. (Her driven husband, rather than the coach, is
the source of most of the pressure.) Eventually the couple reconciles, although the
wife’s motivations for returning are unclear, and go on to win the world championship.
The Speed of the White Queen (Khod beloi korolevoi, 1971) returns to a trope of
the earlier, classic master plot by focusing on the role of the coach in inspiring an athlete
52According to Edelman, during this period there was a lot of criticism in the Soviet
press about Soviet soccer players, in particular, being undertrained. Edelman, Serious
Fun p. 172.
38
to achieve international victory. The coach in this film is far different from the kindly,
humorous, avuncular trainer of the films of the early 1950s, however. Here a self-
sacrificing, unsmiling Nordic skiing coach decides to quit to return to his “true”
profession of architecture because his skiers lack dedication, preferring to party instead
of train. When the coach spots a raw talent, though, he is lured back to the sport.
Fortunately, the skier is a passive and malleable young woman who subjects herself to a
victory, she nevertheless becomes a world champion by anchoring a relay team. This
depressing theme is reprised in It’s Just a Game (Takaia ona,igra, 1976), a return to the
soccer film. Here the team is so lazy and unmotivated that their coach quits. The
players’ wives and girlfriends are thrilled; these self-centered, not-very-Soviet women
want their men to leave soccer in favour of something “respectable.” Eventually, the
players come back together and win, but this sour and unconvincing drama could not
Two other films from the late 1970s shift the focus somewhat, from the
individual sports star in a collective society. In The Son of a Champion (Syn chempiona,
1979), the star of the Soviet downhill team stubbornly refuses to ski as an act of
rebellion against his father, the team’s hard-driving coach and a former world champion
skier. Eventually the egotistical young man recognizes that the team needs him, and he
wins the last leg of an international competition for his comrades. This might seem
reminiscent of films from the early fifties like The Reserve Player and Champion of the
39
World, but The Son of a Champion completely lacks the humor and optimism of its
predecessors.
film about a childish but enormously gifted young swimmer who is spotted by a scout at
a regional competition in Sochi. The swimmer is invited to Moscow to train, where she
immediately breaks Soviet and world records. But unlike the young-athletes-from rural
backwaters in earlier films who thrive in the big city and under a demanding training
competitions and suffers from panic attacks at critical moments. In the end, the
youngster cedes her place on the team to an aging champion. The message is a new one
for Soviet sport cinema: maturity proves more important than raw talent, and the young
Although this body of work is interesting for what it confirms about the malaise
among Soviet youth in the 1970s and the state’s interest in reviving traditional Soviet
values of collectivism, hard work, and respect for authority, its impact was likely
marginal. Unfortunately, all these films suffer from poor production, banal scripts, and
mediocre acting. If the intention was to instill the core Soviet values in a Soviet youth
that was rejecting them in favor of other, less taxing (and more Western-oriented)
leisure activities, they have to be counted failures. There is no evidence that these films
40
“Hard” Propaganda: Soviet Sport as Cold War Proxy
Most Soviet sports films aimed at defining the Soviet athlete in a positive way rather
than on defaming the competition, to the extent that it is hard to find a pure example of
negative Cold War filmmaking in the genre. Although Soviet cinema made a number of
highly successful hard propaganda films during the early Cold War, as we have already
noted, the sole attempt at replicating this feat in the sports genre during Stalin’s time is
not among them. Actually, most of the film Sporting Honor (Sportivnaia chest, 1951) is a
jolly comedy featuring the same motifs as The Reserve Player and Champion of the
World, discussed above as “soft” propaganda. Svetlugin, a factory worker from the
Urals, is an unschooled talent who joins a leading soccer team. Grinko, the team’s star
player, resents the newcomer and attempts to undermine him. Except for the arrogant
Grinko, everybody is having fun and living the Soviet good life. Only at the end, in a
sequence that seems tacked on, does the mood turn dark due to Cold War tensions.
Now united, with Grinko accepting his new teammate, the team goes abroad to
compete with a Western team that is backed by nefarious bourgeois types, including a
monstrously ugly priest. The match, played in driving rain and fog that suggests Britain,53
but the “new Soviet system of [collective] play” prevails. The team is also buoyed by
receiving dozens of telegrams urging them on from all over the USSR. With this
53 The film might have been alluding to Moscow Dynamo’s famously successful tour of
Britain in 1945. On this tour see David Downing, Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in
Britain, 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).
41
collective support, how could the Soviet team lose? Although it faced some criticism
for its fun bits, this lively and entertaining film took fifth place at the box office, with a
During the cultural thaw of the late fifties, many directors sought the
have seen, this was not an opportune moment for the sports film to develop beyond its
established conventions. Given that many of this era’s film artists were preoccupied
with rewriting the history of the Great Patriotic War, it should come as no surprise that
the major sports film of the Khrushchev era, Third Period (Tretii taim, 1962), dramatizes
a “true story” from the war, a soccer “death match” pitting Soviet POWs against
German soldiers that took place in Kiev on June 22, 1942, the first anniversary of the
German invasion. This was an international match with the highest possible stakes: the
price of victory for the Red Army soldiers would be death.55 Third Period is a hybrid,
reflecting some Thaw themes and stylistics but also socialist realist tendencies that
42
would have been quite acceptable to Stalin. As in a socialist realist film, the villains, the
German officers, are with one exception thoroughly bad. Yet the heroes are more finely
drawn than in socialist realist cinema, as is the supporting cast. For example, a local
collaborator is assigned to the team and wants to throw the game, but the viewer easily
empathizes with his fear of the consequences of victory. There is also a “good” German,
a former professional soccer player who tries to argue with his commandant that sports
and politics should never be mixed. Yet, as was the case in many Stalinist films, the
heroes’ true triumph is not the victory on the soccer field, but rather their courageous
willingness to die for their motherland. This emotionally fraught film evidently struck a
chord with Soviet audiences, coming in sixth at the box office in 1963, with 32 million
viewers, making it the most-watched sports film in the history of Soviet cinema.56
However, the “hardest” of the hardline Cold War sports films, and the only truly
negative one, was A Cool Guy (Mirvoi paren, 1971), about a truck road rally in an
unnamed Middle Eastern country that was filmed by the Belorussian film studio in
Afghanistan. A truck factory in Minsk has produced a spectacular heavy-duty truck that
the Soviets want to sell abroad. The rally is a perfect stage on which to showcase the
Soviet vehicle, which is competing against rival trucks from European and American
companies. Many of the Westerners are serious bad guys, even stooping to sabotage
and murder to win the rally. (This is less true of the drivers than their backers; it is
worth noting that the American, Parker, is actually more upstanding than the rest of the
43
“bourgeois” drivers.) A Cool Guy is definitely a sports film about moral character: the
hero, the Soviet driver Viktor Login, is a clean-cut young man who has no desire to travel
abroad and has his worst fears about foreign culture confirmed by the assorted
capitalist types he encounters on his plane coming over. His repulsion increases when
he arrives at his destination and sees the crowded, dirty streets and the amoral scene at
the Western-style bar where the drivers congregate. But, as the film proclaims,
“Russians are not afraid of anything.” Eventually, even though he is attacked by thugs
and temporarily thrown in jail, Viktor manages to win the rally. He cannot wait to return
to the clean, orderly USSR, and the film closes with an aerial panorama of a Soviet
cityscape.
A Cool Guy is as close to a stereotypical Cold War film as we can find in Soviet
sports cinema, but, although some viewers might well have enjoyed their campiness, its
cartoonish images of Westerners were already being challenged by 1971. There are no
box office figures available for this movie; A Cool Guy is so obscure that it is not even
included in the most comprehensive listing of Soviet feature films.57 Certainly, the
endless scenes of trucks rumbling along twisting mountain roads do not make for
exciting viewing, and it is hard to imagine Soviet audiences devoting the time or money
to see it.
44
As we have noted already, Soviet cinema could never hope to match Hollywood’s global
reach. True, the Soviet Union had a supposedly “captive” market in its East European
bloc, but Soviet films were rarely particularly popular there, although they were
certainly screened. Film exchange agreements—with the United States and India, for
productions.58 A few Soviet films did break through the audience barrier during the Cold
War, especially during the Thaw, but were usually pictures released to the international
film festival circuit.59 No sports films were among them, these being produced for the
sports films that sought to counteract negative views of America’s race problem, we
might consider the ways that many Soviet sports films indirectly sought to challenge the
West’s cinematic views of Soviet athletes.60 The American construction of the Soviet
athlete is best exemplified by Rocky IV’s spectacularly caricatured villain Ivan Drago, a
gigantic, ridiculously muscled automaton. (Although “Ivan” is used to typify the Russian
58 For a discussion of the fate of Soviet films in the United States and India, see James H.
Krukones, “The Unspooling of Artkino: Soviet Film Distribution in America, 1940-
1975,”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29, no. 1 (March 2009) and Sudha
Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinema: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
59 Woll, Real Images, passim.
60 One outlier must be noted, Flight 222 (Reis 222, 1985), which depicts the defection of
a Soviet athlete while on a trip to the US. This is interesting because it was based on the
real life defection of the ballet dancer Alexander Godunov in 1979; actually, it was
performing artists, not athletes, who tended to defect. For more on this film see Shaw
and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 57-58.
45
common man even by Russians, “Drago” is not a Russian surname, nor does it sound like
one.) In fact, no Soviet sports film emphasized the purely physical attributes of its
athletes, except as a joke; in Champion of the World, for example, the wrestler-hero’s
amazing breathing capacity is played for comic relief. Instead, all Soviet sports films
took pains to present Soviet sportsmen and sportswomen as fully, painfully human; if
the athletes do not question their own abilities, circumstances usually force them to do
so. And unlike in Hollywood films, pretty girls do not seem to be naturally attracted to
competitive sportsmen. As the films from the seventies show, the opposite appears to
be true. A least on film, Soviet sports stars have to work hard to win—or win back—the
girl.
American sports propaganda during the Cold War also claimed that Soviet
Soviet sports films, the “real” profession of the athlete is almost always underscored,
and especially in the earlier films, the factory manager or factory committee puts in an
obligatory appearance. Additionally, most of the films emphasize that Soviet athletes
absolutely will not drink alcohol, even while others around them are doing so; in general
The truth is therefore that Soviet cinema imagined the Soviet sports hero in
almost exactly the same way that Hollywood constructed the American sports hero.
Both are depicted as honest and hardworking, and motivated by love of family and
46
athlete hero with the help of a coach (who represents the state)—comes straight from
Dissent
Obviously American directors were able to make many more “dissenting” pictures than
their Soviet counterparts, but even in the darkest days of censorship some Soviet
One can also occasionally find evidence of dissent in films that were released. The
earliest film to deviate from the norms established for the Soviet sports film genre in the
post-World War II era is Elem Klimov’s highly experimental and largely unsuccessful
Sport, Sport, Sport (1970), which was based on a script by his brother, long-jumper
German Klimov.62 A pastiche of acted and documentary material, the film is anchored—
to the extent that it can be—by the anecdotes and philosophical musings of an old
sports masseur, Uncle Volodya. Although on the surface the film seems to support the
Party line on sports as promoting good character as well as a means of advertising the
superiority of the Soviet system, the eccentricities of its style may be seen as a mockery
61For a catalogue of Soviet films banned from 1917 to 1953, see Evgenii Margolit
and Viacheslav Shmyrov, Iziatoe kino (Moscow: Dubl-D, 1995).
62 German Klimov wrote several more scripts for sports films; see, e.g., Men’s Games in
the Fresh Air (Muzhskie igry na svezhem vozdukhe, 1978), a glum depiction of two rival
decathletes who never manage to overcome their differences, produced by the very
minor Riga studio.
47
of its putative message. Certainly it subverts the conventions of the genre. Unusual
among sports films for the amount of critical attention it received, which was mainly
negative, Sport, Sport, Sport did not attract an audience outside of film festivals.63
By the late 1970s, the Brezhnev regime’s grip over the film industry was
inconsistent, and it was sometimes possible to make films that openly questioned the
these films, The Girl and Grand (Devushka i Grand, 1980), also typifies the Soviet film
was a backhanded tribute to the American films that enjoyed increasing popularity in
the USSR even though Cold War rhetoric was heating up.64 The Girl and Grand concerns
a young woman who trains Grand, a handsome but difficult stallion born at a large
breeding farm in the Caucasus. Eventually, the troublesome horse is sold at auction for a
high price to a British sportsman. Awhile later, the girl travels to England to help a
Grand’s rider is thrown, whereupon the girl immediately mounts him and finishes the
63 For an excellent analysis of this bizarre film see Christine Gölz, “Sport, Sport, Sport, or
a Cinema Experiment with the ‘Formula of Harmony,’” in Katzer et al., eds., Euphoria
and Exhaustion, 339-59. Klimov’s best known film is his 1985 masterpiece Come and
See (Idi i smotri), set in Belorussia in World War II.
64 The enormous popularity of Vladimir Menshov’s Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
(Moskva slezam ne verit, 1979), an old-fashioned “girl friends” film in the Hollywood
style, is a case in point. Seen by nearly 80 million viewers, and winner of an Oscar for
best foreign picture, it puts the relative popularity of Third Period (almost 50 million
fewer viewers) in perspective. On the influence of American films on Soviet film
production see Denise J. Youngblood, “Americanitis: The ‘Amerikanshchina’ in Soviet
Cinema,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 19, No. 4 (Winter 1992).
48
race, winning for the British owner! Grand’s grateful master improbably returns the
valuable horse to her and the film ends with the girl riding Grand in a dressage event.
The Girl and Grand makes it seem that Soviet-Western sports competition had already
ended, when in some ways it was actually reaching new heights. This entertaining film—
who does not love a girl and her horse?—was a modest success at the box office with 11
million viewers, at a time when movie attendance was dropping dramatically in favor of
television.65
Two other films upended the tropes of the Soviet sports film in much more
serious ways. A Race without a Finish (Gonka bez kontsa, 1977) is only marginally a
sports film, but a highly revelatory one nonetheless. The Soviets are trying to build a
racecar that can successfully compete internationally with Western cars. Unlike the
Soviet-made champion trucks in A Cool Guy, here Soviet autos are portrayed as
distinctly inferior. There are serious quality control problems at the factory due to lazy
workers, but the factory director refuses to listen to the inspector, a young woman.
Unlike in a socialist realist film, these issues are not resolved, and the Soviet cars break
Another dissident film from this period badly misjudged how much criticism of
Soviet life and sport could be tolerated, and was banned. Viktor Krokhin’s Second Try
(Vtoriaia popytka Viktora Krokhina, 1977) features a young boxer who is thoroughly
ruined as a person, first because of early hardship and second because of his single-
49
minded focus on his sport. The film is a harshly realistic look at the life of a boxer, from
his brutal and impoverished childhood in the slums of post-war Leningrad to his boxing
career 20 years later, when he is a vulgar, cold, arrogant champion. Some of the
documents related to the banning of Viktor Krokhin have been published and reveal that
its shocking deviation from the feel-good norms of Soviet filmmaking truly unsettled
Although the late seventies saw a number of important films of social criticism,
the heyday of Soviet dissent was without doubt the glasnost era. The most prominent
films of this heady and demoralizing period in Soviet cinematic history focused on the
Sports were not a dominant theme, given the scope of the crises the country faced.
Although there were a few documentary movies that attacked the Soviet sports
“machine,” the most controversial feature film to focus on this subject was The Dolly
even though her trainers know she has suffered a serious back injury. After her health is
ruined, she is forced to return to a home and mother she really does not know and,
worse yet, to enter an alien society: a high school, where she is mocked and shunned
50
because she is a world champion, a Soviet “Master of Sport.” Intensely angry at her fate,
the girl becomes a cruel bully who revels in exposing her teacher’s romance with a
student. Unable to cope outside the institutionalized Soviet sporting system, and now
ostracized by everyone, the “dolly” commits suicide.68 According to Russian critic Sergei
Tsyrkun, The Dolly enjoyed considerable popularity among young athletes for daring to
Conclusion
Comparing U.S. and Soviet sports films made during the Cold War is not
altogether an easy task, especially for those historians interested in exploring what went
on behind the screen as much as what appeared on it. In general, American film archives
are much richer and, even in the 2010s, more accessible than their Soviet counterparts.
The difficulty in finding viewing copies of some Soviet sports movies makes meaningful
scholars run the risk of focusing greater attention on the American material and thereby
possibly over-emphasizing its depth and propagandistic versatility. This, in turn, can on
the one hand add false weight to the argument that the Americans fought the Cold
War’s battle for hearts and minds more skillfully and on the other exacerbate the
68To situate this film in the context of glasnost cinema, see ibid., 184.
69Sergei Tsyrkun, “Ultra-si: Sportivnoe kino kak chast sovetskoi mifologii,” Iskusstvo
kino, No. 11 (November 2007), p. 7.
51
Western-centric nature of much of the work that has been conducted into the Cultural
conclusions about American and Soviet sports cinema during the Cold War. The first is
that Cold War sports cinema incorporated a dizzying array of activities—on almost every
conceivable surface, from grass and tartan to water and ice—and that it involved far
more than direct, head-to-head clashes between the two countries’ athletes. Indeed,
very few films did in fact focus on American and Soviet athletes competing against one
another. This tells us something about cinema’s limitations compared, say, with live
television coverage of sporting clashes. It also tells us to widen our definition of the Cold
Secondly, surprisingly perhaps given the degree to which Soviet sports were
overtly politicized, overall sports played a more prominent propagandistic role in the
American film industry than in the Soviet one. This was particularly the case when it
came to targeting international audiences. This, again, tells us we need to broaden our
definitions, in this case of propaganda, to take in visual material that reaches across a
wide spectrum from negative to positive and that serves a wide range of political and
social functions, some overt, some covert. The Cold War was a propaganda conflict par
excellence and therefore involves far more sporting movies than the likes of Rocky IV.
military conflict between the United States and the USSR during the Cold War, and that
52
both countries put so much energy into mobilizing cinema in the conflict’s crucial battle
for hearts and minds, it is not surprising that American and Soviet sports films
crystallized many of the issues that were felt to be at stake. What is remarkable—at
least in the context of the “two camps” rhetoric employed by the United States and the
USSR during the Cold War—is how similar the cinematic output of the two ideological
foes was. What stands out most is how much each side focused on positive, indirect
propaganda, that is, on images that many people at the time would not have
interpreted as propaganda. Key to this was affirming their side’s moral superiority by
using sports as a metaphor for righteous competition. The team with the best athletes
wins, and in American and Soviet films “best” is defined in terms of old-fashioned
values—of hard work, discipline, sacrifice for the greater good, honesty and humanity.
In both countries’ movies, sporting victories are more likely to be presented less as a
vindication for any sort of international ideological “system” and more loosely as an
indication of that country’s superior way of life. Patriotism, rather than capitalism or
criticism of this way of life. This form of dissent was particularly pronounced by the
1970s when, in documentaries such as Hearts and Minds, American filmmakers used
sport to interrogate the whole basis of U.S. foreign policy. Significantly, however, Soviet
filmmakers went several steps further than niche, anti-Vietnam War movies like Hearts
and Minds to use sport to question the very nature of communism. Even in early Cold
War comedies, talented Soviet athletes would be shown resisting training and self-
53
abnegation and having to be coaxed and cajoled by their coaches along the right path.
By the 1970s, this resistance had become much stronger, as Soviet athletes, like all
Soviet youth, were seduced, not by the joys and rewards of work—and sports were
sports films of the 1970s and 1980s are not an affirmation of Soviet values as much as
they are a plea to return to them. A film like The Dolly is so devastating because it
reveals the falsity of the promises made to Soviet youth by the sports establishment.
between American and Soviet Cold War cinema and arguably indeed between American
and Soviet culture generally. Contrary to prevailing views during the conflict, and still
now to an extent, American filmmakers were more adept than their Soviet counterparts
here, in the sporting sphere Soviet efforts at this were at best half-hearted, failing, for
more defensive posture. Why this is the case is unclear but certainly Soviet cinema
produced nothing like Rocky IV. In doing so, it missed a trick. From a propaganda
perspective, American cinema was more versatile, better equipped and, as the evidence
Acknowledgements
54
We would like to thank the following for their helpful critiques of earlier versions of this
essay: Andrei Apostolov, Olga Klimova, Frank Manchel, Oleg Riabov, and the three
anonymous readers for JCWS. We would also like to thank the German Historical
Institute in Moscow for hosting the conference at which these ideas were first
presented.
55