Hollywood comrades: why the Soviets were such lovable movie villains.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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LONG BEFORE everybody else figured out the truth from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's samizdat books, from an empire-crushing economic collapse, from a stream of defecting citizens, and from vodka's role in the death of the martini, Hollywood recognized the central flaw of the Soviet Union: It was boring.

This is not to disparage the great Russian people nor to slight their empire. If anything, the combustible mix of bloody tribes and fierce hatreds that comprised first Czarist Russia and then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not boring enough. It's a tribute of sorts that the Soviets managed for 74 years to make it all seem unspeakably dull.

That dullness, I think, is the best explanation for one of the most puzzling lacunae in movie history. Why was Hollywood unwilling or unable to make compelling narratives about the horrors of the Soviet system?

This question has been asked repeatedly since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. In the June 2000 reason, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley wrote that Tinseltown's many communists had succeeded not so much in putting active red propaganda up on screen as in blocking films that might have explored the USSR's murderous and criminal nature. In a 2007 article for the American Thinker, J.R. Dunn called Hollywood's ignorance of its own anti-communist legacy--neglected films like Elia Kazan's Man on a Tightrope and Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street--"inexcusable." Recently, MGM reopened the question by announcing its intention to remake the one film everybody agrees depicted the Russians as thoroughly bad guys: John Milius' Red Dawn (1984), in which Soviet and Latin American communists conquer the United States through force of arms.

With great respect for Red Dawn's endurance as a camp touchstone (notable in recent years when the team that captured Saddam Hussein was revealed to have drawn many of the code words for its mission from the film), the movie actually reveals why the Russians made such poor cinema villains. Even at the time, with the Soviet war machine bogged down for a fifth year in Afghanistan, the idea that the Russians could invade and hold a big portion of the United States was preposterous.

Nor was Red Dawn totally anomalous. ABC ran its own version of the Soviet occupation of America in 1987, just four years before the extinction of the Soviet Union, with Amerika, a 14-hour miniseries made glorious (though not plausible) by an all-star cast headed by Kris "Don't...