Pardon the geek typography ("^2" means
"squared" or "repeat a second time"), but there wasn't
enough room to put the movie's full title—"The Russians Are Coming the
Russians Are Coming" in the headline comfortably. Made in 1966 at the height of the Cold
War between the old Soviet Union and the U. S., the film portrays what might
have happened if a small Soviet submarine ran aground by accident near the
shore of a rustic vacation island off the coast of New England. I date myself when I confess I saw it
when it first came out, and it's one of the few comedies I saw as a child that
still seems funny to this 60-year-old.
The humor may be timeless, but the plot is not. It hinges on the fact that with one
exception, the most advanced communications technology on the island is the
telephone office whose sole manual switchboard is run by grandmotherly Alice
Foss, who knows everybody's name in town and takes eccentric Muriel Everett's
report of being attacked by Russians with a large grain of salt—at least until
Muriel's phone line goes dead. But
by then, the nine Russian sailors who came ashore to find a boat big enough to
tow their sub off the rocks have cut the phone wires to that section of town
(it was apparently a party line), so the only way word can travel after that is
if a person carries it himself. In
the process of spreading the word, the rumor-mill game starts, and a report of
one Russian sailor attacking Muriel distorts into a whole troop of Russian
parachutists taking over the island's airport. Most of the rest of the film follows the five-man police
force and a separate vigilante mob led by a self-appointed death-and-glory war
veteran, who each think the Russians are somewhere different, and charge around
town sowing confusion and more misinformation wherever they go. The mixups are augmented when the
Russians make their way to town, tie up Mrs. Foss, and axe the main phone
cables. A rather sentimental and
unlikely incident near the end of the film unites all the town's residents with
the Russians, but the whole thing nearly ends up starting World War III anyway
when the war vet gets to the only two-way radio in town and calls the U. S. Air
Force into action. Universal
holocaust is averted only when the townies escort the sub out to sea with their
own boats, which leads the Air Force fighters to call off their attack, and the
day is saved.
Try to update the plot to 2014, and you run into
trouble right away. The first
American who spots the Russians is the ten-year-old son of a vacationing writer,
who refuses to believe his boy when the kid tells Dad there's nine men in black
in the garage with Tommy guns. If
something like that happened today, said son would have posted the guys' photos
on whatever it is you post photos on when you're ten years old and have a
cellphone these days, and inside of five minutes the FBI might have been on the
case. And the same goes for the
creaky old plot device of cutting phone lines, which was laid to rest when the
first cellphones (mobile phones, as they are called in world outside the U. S.)
came out. Ironically, rather than
helping matters, the only wireless link in the movie—the two-way radio—nearly
leads to disaster when it's used to call in the Air Force.
It may seem trivial to note the passing of a slower
mode of life in which news sometimes had to be carried by hand, so to
speak. But the same thing has
happened to our lives that has happened to that fifty-year-old plot. Those who want to know what is going on
in the lives of significant others these days can keep up with them almost
constantly with no time lag via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, and
there is some concern that excessive indulgence in such things can be an
addictive hazard for some people.
Back in the 1850s, when the electromagnetic telegraph
first began to send news around the country at nearly the speed of light,
critics worried that life was simply getting too fast and there would be
adverse consequences. Well,
whatever the consequences were, we seem to have adapted to them just fine, and
in some ways the habit of keeping in constant touch with others via electronic
media is perhaps a return to a very primitive way of life. An anthropologist I read years ago (and
have since lost the reference to) noted that in tribal societies, where work
such as farming and handicrafts are done in groups, people chat all the time
about other people, mostly, and this is the normal way life goes. So after an industrial interlude of 150
years or so in which workers left the farm for factories and offices where you
were expected to deal silently with your job unless it required you to talk,
maybe we are using social media and electronics to return to what used to be
normal. At least, some people
are.
Yours truly does not have a Facebook page. I have never posted an Instagram, or
tweeted, or used a hashtag, or any of that other stuff, though my wife keeps me
posted on notable doings of people we know who do those things. I refrain from these modes of
communication not out of any principled objection, but mainly because the
payoff doesn't seem worth the effort, at least to me. Blame it on my Y-chromosomes and the fact that males in
general, and engineers in particular, often deal more easily with things than
with people. If I'm going to put
in an hour or two learning new software, as a result I'd rather be able to
analyze plasma spectra, say, as opposed to finding out that some guy I knew in
high school has opened a new restaurant.
To those who enjoy social media and the ease of
instant global communication, I say:
good for you. Go ahead and
enjoy them in reasonable moderation.
Only be careful not to start World War III.
Sources:
I referred to
the Internet Movie Database listing of "The Russians Are Coming the Russians
Are Coming" at www.imdb.com.
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