Watch The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! For Free

Excellent but underrated film

Crappy film

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

While this certainly represents a part of history that is long gone (the cold war), new conflicts in the world are pretty much creating the same type of paranoia as that episode of world history did. It's not the citizens of these individual countries that deserve our hate or fear, it's their leaders, because the citizens are most likely even more oppressed by those leaders as we are afraid of them. In the case of these Russians whose submarine lands off the New England coast stuck on a sandbar, all they want is help getting unstuck and go on with whatever they were doing prior to the situation that got them there in the first place. What they are doing off the American coast is never really explained as the opening is all in Russian, but that doesn't matter: everything is pretty obvious from the start. It is indeed a mad, mad, mad, mad situation for the poor Russian men and the Americans either on vacation in this quaint coastal town or the people who live there year round. The Russians instill fear from their first appearance, trying to find out from playwright Carl Reiner and his wife Eva Marie Saint where they can get a boat to unstick them. Fear takes over everybody as the news gets around, and for gossipy Doro Merande, that means being put up on the wall bound and gagged in a chair where husband Parker Fennelly, deaf as a post, doesn't hear her attempts at screams or even notice her. Portly telephone Tessie O'Shea ends up tied together with a man half her size, and their attempts to get out of the telephone office will have you in hysterics. Ben Blue tries vainly while drunk to get on his horse to become a 1960's version of Paul Revere, but it's love at first sight with blonde American Andrea Dromm and the very handsome John Philip Law whose heart seems to be as big as all of the U.S.S.R. combined.Then, there's the law: Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters and Paul Ford, all comically inept, Russian commander Theodore Bikel and Alan Arkin as the head of the land-bound Russians who at one point seems to be gunned down by a hot headed American who shoots first and thinks later. The Russians really give them no reason to panic after the initial shock of their appearance and only resort to pulling out their arsenal of weapons when the Americans refuse to listen to them, only assuming the worst. This is continuously funny, but with subtle lessons of a need for world understanding that often gets overshadowed by the individual refusal to see people beyond the assumed stereotypes of their culture. As for the ending stand-off, it's both tense and poignant, as what could have been sappy involving Johnny Whittaker's young character nearly sliding off a church roof to his death. This leads to cultural understanding that had audiences in both the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. cheering and realizing how much we share as human beings, rather how different we are. I would say that this may have seemed to have been dated at one point, but the more time that passes, the more I realize how fresh it is today. Unfortunately, the environment that surrounds the world today would have this situation turning out more tragically than heroically, and that's a shame. Perhaps the viewing of this film is more important for that purpose alone, because it gives us the opportunity to think about our neighbors in more human terms and not see everybody out to bring others outside their cultures and races down.

I've been reading many of the reviews and comments here and the message boards by many who just don't get it or seem to have a sense of humor. I first saw this movie at the drive-in when I was a young boy. My parents didn't have to keep telling us to cover our eyes unlike the movies of today. You look at many of the movies like Ghostbusters, Click etc. where they just had to stick in inappropriate scenes unlike the family movies back in those days. You also have to place yourself during the middle of the Cold War in the 60's when the belief was that all Russians were evil and wanted to destroy us. Even a cartoon like Rocky & Bullwinkle, with the characters Boris and Natasha, was teaching us the Russians were evil and this movie comes around showing they are as human as the rest of us and pokes fun as to the paranoia and suspicion that let's everyone's minds run away from them.I guess I'm old fashioned though because I just don't get today's movies which runs short on a plot and reality and just can't help with all the CGI, massive explosions and massive gunfights.

So I watched "The Russians are coming The Russians are coming" made in 1966. So is this a classic or even a good movie, well I got say ehhhh once again. This movie has a great cast (including one of my personal faves Jonathan Winters), a great director, and an interesting premise, but ultimately falls apart in the end. I think it falls apart because it is basically supposed to be a lighthearted comedy, so it is supposed to have a happy ending, but it just seemed contrived to me. I did enjoy watching a movie that apparently took place in a time when not only didn't people have cell phones, but they used switchboards and cranked their phones. Another thing I enjoyed were how there were no subtitles for what the Russians were saying, I don't know if it was intentional, but it put the audience in the same world with the characters who couldn't understand them either. So should you skip this one, well I don't know, I did find much of this film very funny including Alan Arkin (still relevant today wow!), but the ending bothered me, maybe you my one reader may feel differently. if you like concise reviews of interesting films please read my other reviews at http://raouldukeatthemovies.blogspot.com/

I remember seeing "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming" when it came out in 1966. My impression was that it was meant to be funny, but I believe that it was overdone. Some aspects were amusing, such as when the Russians asked Walt about the area (military bases, town fuzz, etc.) Pete, going into fourth grade (or had been promoted, could not tell which), declared that Daddy was acting like Arnold Benedict! (He obviously meant the Revolutionary hero-turned-renegade Benedict Arnold.) Another laugher was the Russians' stealing the Ford station wagon that the Whittakers had borrowed/rented, and have it run out of gas, followed by strains of "Long, Long Way to Tipperarie". There also were pleasant aspects of the flick, like the Whittakers' summer house, which reminded my of my grandparents' summer home in Little Deer Isle, Maine, and of cottages that my family rented in Ocean Park, Maine. One aspect of the costuming also stood out, that Elspeth wore wheat jeans much like those that I often wore in those days! I did not think much of Alison Palmer; some people to whom I described the movie thought she was a dud! I noted that the book, The Off-Islanders by Nathaniel Benchley, was basis for the movie; some aspects of the book were omitted. On the whole, I liked the book better than the movie.