Save the date

One is right­eously temp­ted to make a joke along the lines of “here’s Uncle Joe, he’s a mov­ing kinda slow,” but one res­ists, and every­body’s happy.

But really, have you ever seen a Stalin with such soul­ful eyes? That’s char­ac­ter act­or Manart Kippen as the dic­tat­or, explain­ing it all to U.S. Ambassador the the Soviet Union Joseph Davies (Walter Huston) in 1943’s Mission To Moscow, one of the most unim­peach­ably bizarre cine­mat­ic efforts to solid­i­fy U.S./U.S.S.R. fellow-feeling in the most cru­cial days of World War II. The pic­ture is going to be shown on TCM on January 20, as part of the series “Shadows of Russia,” co-programmed by my pals Lou Lumenick of the New York Post and The Self-Styled Siren her­self, Farran Nehme Smith. (Farran’s writ­ten more about the series here; Lou, about Mission, here.) But, if you’re lucky enough to reside in the tri-state area, as we call it, you can see this mind-bending pic­ture on the big screen, fol­lowed by a pan­el dis­cus­sion fea­tur­ing Lou, Farran, my own self, and film his­tor­i­an Ed Hulse. It’s at the BAM Rose Cinema, Tuesday, January 12 at 7 p.m., and the details are here. I’m gonna bring my iPod and play the oddball nov­elty gos­pel hit “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’ ” by the Golden Gate Quartet if I can, as I’ll be focus­ing on weird pop cul­ture depic­tions of Stalin from the WWII era. Hope to see you there!