With pro-Soviet sympathy in America at an all-time high thanks to the recent Nazi invasion of Russia, the distributors of A Day in Soviet Russia could be assured excellent box-office returns in the U.S. The film is unabashedly propagandistic, trumpeting the industrial and technological advances made in the USSR since the installation of the Stalin regime. Among the visual highlights are a four-engined passenger plane with a 64-person capacity and a high-speed excursion train. The editing is surprisingly haphazard, especially for a country that boasted such montage experts as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Ironically, A Day in Soviet Russia is narrated by journalist Quentin Reynolds, later one the most strident anti-communist commentators of the 1950s.
by Hal Erickson
synopsis
