Two Worlds

The new boffola of the Soviet screen is Meeting on the Elbe, and it has everything--American reactionaries, stolen secret formulas, a sexy, blonde FBI undercover agent, music by Shostakovich. Above all, it has a message. So far 2,000,000 Moscow movie fans have seen it; it has packed 22 of the Russian capital's 50 movie theaters.

The film's plot unfolds in the twin towns of Altenstadt and Neuburg, on either side of the Elbe, in the Soviet and American zones of Germany. One dramatic shot shows Russians and Americans meeting on the Elbe, with Russian guns grimly pointed westward. The hard-working Russian hero, Major Nikita Kuzmin, is a glaring contrast to the American Major James Hill, an amiable good-for-nothing who carries a bottle of Black & White Scotch in his hip pocket, and tries to involve his highminded Russian opposite number in "some kind of a little deal" on the black market.

Major Hill is completely under the thumb of General MacDermott, one of the most sinister characters ever to wear a U.S. uniform. In one scene, MacDermott is seen sitting in a booty-bulging castle, listening to stock exchange quotations, while his wife has her portrait painted. Upon hearing that timber prices are rising in England, the alert army wife gives the general a shrewd tip: "Have the Germans chop down their forests around the city and ship the wood to be sold in England. What have you been appointed a general for if you can't make use of it?"

Hill is broken faster than a soda cracker by American "fascists" (who have presumably taken over the Pentagon), when he interferes with the plans of slinky Spy Sherwood, who is helping an important Nazi war criminal to escape to the U.S. zone. A German scientist points the picture's timely moral: "Two worlds have met on the Elbe's shores. Germany cannot just stay in between. The time to make a choice has come."

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