★★★★★ 0/5

Movie: The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.

A 1966 comedy classic is about to get a run on 7TWO.

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Not often a movie on Free to Air is worth an alert, but I remember watching The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming many years ago, so I’ll be interested to see how it holds up now.

This 1966 comedy by Norman Jewison kicks off when a Russian submarine accidentally runs aground near the small New England town. Rather than radio for help and risk an embarrassing international incident, the captain sends a nine-man landing party headed by his second-in-command Lieutenant Rozanov (Alan Arkin) to find a motor launch to help free the sub. The men arrive at the house of a vacationing playwright and try to pass themselves off as Norwegian.

What follows is a comedy of errors as the locals think Russia is invading the USA.

The cast also includes Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint and Brian Keith. The film won Golden Globes and Writers Guild of America awards.

It will air next Saturday arvo at 12pm on 7TWO.

Here’s the original trailer with both Reiner and Arkin introducing the film in character.

UPDATED: Cancel that! 7TWO just replaced it with Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) and not even one with Peter Sellers!

5 Responses

  1. Okay, I take back my criticism of ABC movies. This Friday at 12.20am ABC1 is screening George Romero’s ‘Night of The Living Dead’. That makes up for all the crap of late…

  2. Andrew M,

    “… showing a regular Saturday night classic or two.” That still happens now, but over on ABC2. Yet, those graveyard scheduled “top hat and tails” movies on ABC1 are getting aired less & less these days. Programs like Big Ideas have pushed them outta the way.

  3. The ABC seems to love boring 1930s melodramas full of top hats and tails. And they have a few decent film noir that are repeated ad nauseam. Then every few months we get a ‘season’ (read 1 or 2) of films by a famous actor or director. Yawn.

    How I pine for the days of Bill Collins showing a regular Saturday night classic or two…

  4. I really enjoyed this when it was first released. It was one of the first films of the extremely photogenic John Phillip Law, before he developed wings in Barbarella.

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