Soviet Films

The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military[2] to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera.

The comedy didn't work for me, one of the most baffling things about that is i spied right away that Billy Wilder co-wrote the script. His comedy may be the most effective on me in classic films, he was one of four writers though and i don't know how much of it was his. The communist jokes especially were very obvious, guess they worked back then when films hadn't begun regularly taking shots at communism but now they are pretty mild and dated. There's also some smug backpatting in it: the silly communists fall in love with the way capitalists live the moment they see it, i know it's a comedy but it's still offputting as you can tell it confirmed the extremely simplistic thoughts of the more uninformed members of the public and also it makes it seem like Soviets are either idiots like the three men or humourless hardas$es with hidden hearts of gold that only capitalism can set free - Garbo. It's hard to blame anyone involved with the film though as during this time you most likely had three choices when portraying Communism: portray it like this, portray it as stereotypically pure evil with no rhyme or reason, or don't portray it at all. I know nothing of Lubitsch political views and i'm kinda curious, i know that Wilder was complicated opposing the HUAC but that being more likely due to his being against people being persecuted for political beliefs rather than communist leaning. Could be wrong though. Anyway my main problem with all of that was that i didn't find most of it funny, offputting as well which most likely played into it.