There’s no shortage of Hollywood films set in the Soviet Union. (Popular ones which come to mind include The Hunt for Red October, Rocky IV, Gorky Park, and Red Heat.)
RealityChuck, I don’t think any of those three films are set in English-speaking areas, though admittedly they do take place in what later became first-world countries.
Interestingly, out of the nine films mentioned so far, none of them are set later than 1917. It would be interesting if no films set in the West were ever set in a time period contemporaneous with the USSR itself.
“Desyat’ Negrityat”, the 1987 Soviet movie version of Agatha Christie’s “And then there were none” (although this version keeps the original, politically-incorrect title in Russian).
It is also the BEST version of that story ever filmed, and the only one (to my knowledge) that keeps the story as published in the novel exactly as-is, or almost.
Missed edit window – if we accept animated films, then we have “Tir” (“Shooting Range”, 1979) – a surreal (and rather propagandistic) movie set in the contemporary USA where an unemployed young man ends up accepting a job as a living target in a shooting gallery. Critic of capitalism, etc. Relevant links:
(Edited to add: link to the wikipedia article on the movie mentioned in my previous post: Desyat Negrityat - Wikipedia )
Yet another! (sorry for the triple-posting :P) “Gonka Veka” (“The Race of the Century”, 1986), which is an account of the “Sunday Times Golden Globe Race” of 1968-1969 (non-stop solo circumnavigation of the world), focusing on doomed sailor Donald Crowhurst. The setting is the UK in the late 1960s, and the movie (of course) criticizes capitalist society for pushing people into an inhuman “rat race” for the money.
Information about this movie is not easy to find in English. There is a mention to it in the Wikipedia article on Donald Crowhurst:
Hmm…the article says it retained the original title, "Ten Little N*gg**s,"which seems so according to the the anglicized name, but Google Translate gives the Cyrillic as “Ten Little Indians.”
Don’t believe Google translate – I speak Russian; the title as-is in Russian means exactly “ten little n-word”.
However, “negrityat” doesn’t have the connotations that “n******” has in English – In Russian it simply means “black men (with the diminutive ending)”. “Negr” in Russian is the standard way to say “a black man”.
As a matter of fact, if you only put the second word in Google translate (негритят) you will see that it gives the translation “Negro”. If we input a different number instead of ten (Десять), for instance “five” (пять негритят), the translation given is “Five Negro”.
It appears that the programmers of Google translate must have hard-coded “Десять негритят” identifying it as the name of the Agatha Christie novel – Ironically giving the still somewhat offensive “Ten Little Indians” title.
When I was in language school, I did see a Soviet adaptation of a contemporary American novel, set in New York. It was actually done quite well, though the production designer should have paid closer attention to his resource materials (hand-painted signs, f’rinstance, were obviously done by non-native English speakers).
I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the film (I think it was a made-for-TV movie), but it was about five or six Vietnam vets reuniting for a heist. One of the vets was dying of Agent Orange; another, IIRC, was named “Gyppo.” It had to have been made in the 1985–89 time frame.
Unlikely. Google Translate uses statistical machine translation, meaning it looks for patterns of cooccurrences of words and phrases across texts in different languages. It’s mapping “Десять негритят” to “Ten Little Indians” because those phrases occur in similar contexts on the web—namely, to describe the same book.
Incidentally, There is a VERY famous Soviet comedy that happens partly in an unspecified “foreign” country and involves the antics of a gang of diamond smugglers trying to recover their cargo that was unwittingly taken by a Soviet tourist that was going back home. “The diamond arm”, it’s called. Very funny movie, but I guess it doesn’t fulfill the conditions of the OP
(Speaking of it, psychonaut, what do you think of the examples so far?)
I think it’s a shame I can’t find any subtitles for Gonka Veka in any language I speak, as it’ll probably be several years before I learn enough Russian to understand it. Fortunately there’s no such problem with Desyat negrityat and I’ve added it to my list of films to see. Tir sounds dire—I have a collection of Soviet animated propaganda films and they’re pretty uniformly boring.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions so far. If anyone knows of any more please keep them coming!
There are two Russian versions of Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways/ The Children of Captain Grant. They’re purportedly better than the version Disney released in the early 1960s (that version wasn’t paricularly faithful to Verne), but I haven’t seen either of them. I understand the music composed for the earlier one was incredibly popular, and is still being played and is easily recocnizable (kinda like John Williams’ film scores).
Of course, it’s not set in the US, but all of the scenes are supposed to be outside of Russia.
CalMeacham, your reference to Disney movies reminds me of Soyuzmultfilm’s adaptations of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The original stories, at least, are set in Ashdown Forest in Britain. I’ve seen parts of the films and don’t remember if they explicitly mention this setting, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t re-set it anywhere else.
Brilliantovaya ruka. According to my sources, it was filmed in Turkey. It’s been some years since I saw it, but I got the impression it took place in Bulgaria, during a typically Soviet Black Sea cruise.
I see from the Wikipedia article on Soyuzmultfilm that they’ve adapted a number of children’s stories and fairy tales set in the (non-anglophone) West. There are a couple films about the Bremen town musicians, one about the Little Mermaid set in Copenhagen, and an Astrid Lindgren work set in Stockholm. There’s also an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s books, which presumably takes place in British colonial India.
Shooting Range was pretty weird, but actually had a much more straightforward plot than the Wikipedia article led me to believe. (Also, the director owes Disney shit-tons of money).
Thanks for the information.