IMDb > Moscow on the Hudson (1984)
Moscow on the Hudson
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Moscow on the Hudson (1984) More at IMDbPro »

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Moscow on the Hudson (1984) -- Sinematurk - Trailer (Flash)

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Overview

User Rating:
6.1/10   4,129 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Down 3% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Writers:
Paul Mazursky (writer) &
Leon Capetanos (writer)
Contact:
View company contact information for Moscow on the Hudson on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
6 April 1984 (USA) more
Genre:
Tagline:
Vladimir Ivanoff walks into a department store to buy blue jeans, walks out with a girl friend, an immigration lawyer and a buddy. His life and theirs will never be the same again.
Plot:
When a Russian musician defects in Bloomingdale's department store in New York, he finds adjusting to American life more difficult than he imagined. full summary | add synopsis
Awards:
Nominated for Golden Globe. more
NewsDesk:
Meg Mazursky Dies From Brain Cancer
 (From WENN. 17 September 2009, 3:01 PM, PDT)

User Comments:
An Eighties-style take on American freedom's superiority to totalitarianism more (38 total)

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)

Robin Williams ... Vladimir Ivanoff

Maria Conchita Alonso ... Lucia Lombardo
Cleavant Derricks ... Lionel Witherspoon, Bloomingdales Security Officer
Alejandro Rey ... Orlando Ramirez, Vladimir's Cuban Lawyer
Saveli Kramarov ... Boris, KGB man (as Savely Kramarov)

Elya Baskin ... Anatoly Cherkasov
Oleg Rudnik ... Yuri
Aleksandr Benyaminov ... Vladimir's Grandfather
Lyudmila Kramarevskaya ... Vladimir's Mother (as Ludmila Kramarevsky)
Ivo Vrzal-Wiegand ... Vladimir's Father (as Ivo Vrzal)
Natalya Ivanova ... Sasha (as Natalie Iwanow)
Tiger Haynes ... Lionel's Grandfather
Eyde Byrde ... Lionel's Mother (as Edye Byrde)
Robert MacBeth ... Lionel's Stepfather
Donna Ingram-Young ... Leanne Witherspoon
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Additional Details

Runtime:
115 min | West Germany:117 min
Country:
Language:
Color:
Color (Metrocolor)
Aspect Ratio:
1.85 : 1 more
Sound Mix:

Fun Stuff

Trivia:
In one scene, a cinema is showing An Unmarried Woman, directed by Paul Mazursky, the director of Moscow on the Hudson. more
Goofs:
Anachronisms: In the USSR of the 1980s even teenagers weren't acquainted with middle finger gesture, let alone an 80-year-old man doing it towards KGB officers. more
Quotes:
french man on bus: [first lines]
french man on bus: Excuse me, sir. Does this bus go to the Lincoln Center?
more
Movie Connections:
Soundtrack:
STARTING OVER more

FAQ

This FAQ is empty. Add the first question.
3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful.
An Eighties-style take on American freedom's superiority to totalitarianism, 14 October 2006
8/10
Author: Erik Flesch from Morenci, AZ

Moscow on the Hudson is a fabulous example of a pretty-good movie chock full of 1980s artifacts like Jordache jeans, feathered hair-dos and Afro Sheen, that is often surprisingly interesting, sensitive and even occasionally profound -- especially on the level of the victory of the individual soul over totalitarianism, and the defense of American capitalism against Marxism.

This film brings back a flood of cultural memories of the Eighties, the decade immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time in the United States when our political and cultural self-esteem matched our economic prosperity. It doesn't hurt that this movie stars a young bearded Robin Williams with heart (and Russian soul!) and a really cute and occasionally nude young Maria Conchita Alonso (a real-life Venezuelan immigrant) full of Italian passion and an ambitious independent spirit.

Only in the early 1980s could blue jeans from Bloomies, velvety white toilet paper, supermarket coffee, studio apartments, hot-dog stands, cab-driving jobs, and U.S. citizenship ceremonies be portrayed as symbols -- indeed even weapons -- of democratic capitalism in a world still governed "from Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea" by the totalitarian evil against which President Ronald Reagan called a crusade two years earlier in his famous 1982 Evil Empire speech to the House of Commons.

The political content of the movie is startlingly black-and-white by today's standards of multiculturalism and moral relativism when many academics defend dictatorships' "sovereign right" to exist, and so the offhand manner with which at every turn the film's writers Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos deliver praise to political liberty, capitalism and America's unique cultural acceptance of immigrants dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is remarkable. While the way in which their praises are conveyed may from time-to-time seem a little cheesy, sentimental or dated, their profound significance is not diminished.

Exactly because capitalism is an economic system as well as a social system, Robin William's character is portrayed as a Russian seeking a remedy for his literal physical hunger and basic financial requirements of life that socialism fails to satisfy. His Russian friend, played wonderfully by Elya Baskin, suffers from socialism's other often dramatized evil -- its humiliating and paralyzing effect on an individual's creative mind and psychology. Perhaps it is precisely because the film's focus is on Williams' character that Moscow on the Hudson at times comes off as exhibiting the over-the-top 1980s commercialism that made it popular then and a little startling in today's Greener age.

Russophiles can get a kick out of some of the Russia scenes. Highlights include the drab Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard including full-figured women in polyester; sour old babushkas enforcing their place in line; and shoe vendors pushing the wrong sizes. They might also find some treatment of Soviet atrocities like sending war protesters to mental institutions, or neighbors reporting dissidents to the KGB a bit trite, but not inaccurate. Such horrors are no less relevant in Putin's Russia of today (October 2006), where the most recent contract killing of independent politicians, businessmen and intellectuals is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

While I've focused on the political content, this movie is not primarily a political piece, but a love story; and not primarily a love story, but a romance of personal initiative -- of immigrants who choose to reject the oppressive circumstances they left behind and to seize the chance to pursue their material survival and eventually, individual happiness. The aims of the film are high, maybe even too high at times for this light film to be able to achieve fully; but it is definitely touching and fairly deals with the array of issues every immigrant faces on a variety of levels. I personally found the love relationship between Williams and Alonso to be touchingly realistic at times; and the individualistic focus of this film to be refreshing, as well as a shocking reminder of how inappropriately self-conscious the American media has become in publicly asserting the universal truth and appeal of its core principles: freedom and capitalism.

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