The Hair of the Dog

PROPAGANDA The Hair of the Dog

Someone in the British embassy noticed by the ads in Evening Moscow that the film Posledny Round (The Last Round) was playing in 21 movie houses at once. It turned out to be the story of a crooked U.S. gambler and an honest prizefighter.

The gambler tries to get the hero to toss the championship fight, and stuffs money in his coat pocket to urge him on, but the hero spurns him. On the big night at the Garden the hero is down on the canvas when he sees the gambler at the ringside grimacing at him to quit. This burns him so much that he leaps up and wins the fight, like that. Soon after, the gambler's goons throw the hero into the Hudson River, but he survives and goes to live in Germany.

There he grooms a husky youth of the blond, Aryan type for the championship. But the slick U.S. gamblers have crossed the ocean, and they put female temptation in the way of the Blond Aryan. Some shots of late nights, cigarettes, etc. make it plain that the Blond Aryan is out of training. In the final fight he appears a pushover, but the hero rushes to the ringside and inspires his protege to get in there and win--which he does.

The British discovered that at this point there was hardly a dry eye in the Russian audience. They also discovered that there were three other similar pictures current, one of them Shkola Nenavisti (The School of Hate), which was about the Irish rebellion. They found, further, that all four films, although they had soundtracks in Russian, were simply described as "foreign films," without hint of origin. The prevalence of blond Teutonic types led to a search of Dr. Goebbels' files. It turned out that Die Letzte Runde and The School of Hate (in German, Mein Leben fue Irland) were Nazi war-hate films, and that they had had their premieres in Berlin in 1941--the year the Nazis attacked Russia.

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