Here is an article from a 1937 issue of Photoplay Magazine reported that in matters cinematic, Joseph Stalin was one tough nut to crack:
“The many times I have interviewed Stalin, I have never found him changed much insofar as American film is concerned. Twice I have sat alongside him while he watched some American-made films, and never heard him grunt one way or the other. One of the films I saw with him was Private Lives. When he was asked for his opinion afterward, he refused it. The picture was, as usual, ‘rejected’.”
“Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, which I saw Charlie make more than a year ago in Hollywood and San Pedro, was the only American picture I ever remember having seen in Moscow. This film packed the theater and was shown twenty-four hours a day.”
American diplomats stationed in Moscow during the post-war years reported that Stalin was a great movie lover and had a private screening room that was quite plush by the standards of the time.
During the Gorbachev era, when the USSR was in its death throes, Tootsie was one of the few American movies that was permitted to be shown. The Soviets liked it because it showed Westerners living uncomfortably in crowded cities and the Russians liked the film because it was simply an amusing romantic comedy.
Click here if you want to know what films Hitler liked.
