Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1966 Cold War comedy "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming", produced and directed by Norman Jewison.

The screenplay by William Rose was adapted from "The Off-Islanders", a 1961 novel by Nathaniel Benchley.

"The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" stars Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Alan Arkin, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters, Theodore Bikel, and Tessie O'Shea with support from Ben Blue, John Philip Law, Andrea Dromm, and Paul Ford.

One late Saturday night, at the end of the summer tourist season, a Soviet submarine, The Sprut, runs aground on a sand bar near Gloucester Island off the coast of New England.

Its captain sends his political officer, Lieutenant Yuri Rozanov, and eight-armed sailors to commandeer a motorboat with enough power to free the sub before its presence could be detected by the local authorities and spark an international incident.

The nine Russians approach an isolated vacation home where Walt Whittaker, a broadway playwright, is vacationing with his wife Elspeth, his nine-year-old son Pete, and three-year-old Annie.

They're in the process of packing up to return to New York after two and a half months on the island.

Pete is the first one to notice the Russian sailors stealthily approaching the house, but his distracted parents pay him little attention.

Then, Lieutenant Rozanov and a young sailor, Alexei Kolchin, come to the door.

They initially claimed to be stranded Norwegians and asked where they might find a boat, only to learn that all the boats are in a harbor at the other end of the island several miles away.

After some probing questions from Walt, Rozanov reveals he and the other men are in fact Russians and interrogates Walt about the island.

Walt, much to his son Pete's chagrin, tells them Gloucester Island is only a small police force and no other defenses, and then surrenders the key to the family station wagon.

Rozanov decides that he and seven of the Soviet sailors will drive to the harbor, leaving Kolchin to guard the Whittaker family and Annie's babysitter Alison Palmer, a pretty 18-year-old who shows up just as the Russians are preparing to leave on the station wagon.

Rozanov's plan seems straightforward enough, but a series of mishaps frustrates his efforts again and again, even as the island's inhabitants slowly become aware that the Russians have landed and take measures to defend the island and themselves.

Director and producer Norman Jewison began work on "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" in 1965 during a particularly fraught period in the Cold War between the United States and its Allies on the one side and the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries on the other.

When John Kennedy became president in 1961, he had initiated a massive increase in the military budget to build up the American nuclear arsenal and train elite forces for unconventional warfare involving Soviet client states.

The Berlin Crisis later that year ramped up tensions and led to the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Closer to home, the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and the later Cuban Missile Crisis led the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

The compromise that brought an end to that crisis was considered by many a major international humiliation for the Soviet Union.

The ouster of Premier Nikita Khrushchev by his associates in the Kremlin in 1964 appeared to offer the possibility of a more stable, if still, contentious relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The fact that Khrushchev was not liquidated, but instead allowed to retire peacefully to a seaside dacha, appeared to indicate the more ruthless political tactics that had prevailed under the rule of his predecessors had moderated somewhat and gave some slight hints of a future detente between East and West.

But in the mid '60s, American concern with the advance of Communist interest in the Third World and a deep suspicion of the covert intentions of the Soviet Union still dominated American politics and popular culture.

It is this suspicion, along with the lingering fear of nuclear war, that lies behind the comedy of tonight's film and marks it as the product of a very specific moment in American history.

"The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming" is based on a 1961 novel, "The Off-Islanders" by Nathaniel Benchley, son of humorist and actor Robert Benchley.

Born in 1915, Nathaniel Benchley wrote several novels, three of which were adapted into films in the '60s.

The other two were the 1961 heist comedy "Sail a Crooked Ship", starring Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, and Ernie Kovacs, and "The Spirit is Willing", a 1967 horror comedy starring Sid Caesar and Vera Miles based on Benchley's 1965 novel "The Visitors" Benchley was also a prolific author of children's books.

In adapting Nathaniel Benchley's novel screenwriter William Rose showed the influence of the many years he had spent writing farcical comedies for Ealing Studios, including "The Maggie" in 1954 and "The Ladykillers" in 1955, both directed by Alexander Mackendrick.

With his wife, Tanya, Rose also wrote the 1963 all-star comedy "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", directed by Stanley Kramer, another farce about ordinary people reacting to extraordinary circumstances.

The year after "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming", Rose scripted Kramer's hit "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", starring Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier, for which Rose won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Although the fictional Gloucester Island is situated off the coast of New England, the film was shot in Northern California, primarily in Mendocino and Fort Bragg, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

Local residents appeared as extras and were delighted to be included in the movie.

Norman Jewison arranged to have each day's rushes shown at a local theater, where the townspeople would go every night with their families to follow the film's progress.

When "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming" was released in May of 1966, it drew mixed reviews.

In the New York Times, Robert Alden said the film was "a rousingly funny, and perceptive, motion picture about a desperately unfunny world situation.

The Cold War has owed us all a good laugh for a long, long time."

Brendan Gill disagreed in the New Yorker.

He wrote "the heavy handed producer and director of the picture, Norman Jewison, has permitted nearly every moment of it to become twice as rightly colored, twice as noisy, and twice as frantic as it needed to be.

This is all the more pity because the cast includes a number of excellent comic actors."

Almost all reviewers praise the movie's cast, including Arthur D. Murphy in Variety, who otherwise disagreed with Gill.

According to Murphy, Director Jewison "has made expert use of all types of comedy techniques, scripted and acted in excellent fashion by both prose and some talented newcomers to pick."

Among those newcomers was Alan Arkin as Lieutenant Yuri Rozanov.

Arkin was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1934, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Germany.

He began acting at 10 and was a member of the Second City comedy troupe in the '60s.

He had his breakthrough in 1963, when he appeared on Broadway, playing the lead in Joseph Stein's comedy "Enter Laughing", based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Carl Reiner.

Arkin received a Tony for his performance.

The next year, he appeared with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in "Luv", spelled L-U-V, under the direction of Mike Nichols.

Akins' combination of menace, gallantry, ingenuity, and frustration in his role as Rozanov won him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Alan Arkin went on to play a range of roles, both serious and comedic, in movies, on stage, and on television.

He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in "Little Miss Sunshine" in 2006.

In addition to his many other accomplishments, Alan Arkin, like Nathaniel Benchley, wrote several children's books, including "Cassie Loves Beethoven", about a music-loving cow, "Tony's Hard Work Day", and "Some Fine Granmpa!".

In 1974, Nathaniel Benchley's son, Peter, following in his father's footsteps, wrote his own novel about an impending disaster on a small island off the coast of New England and the local authorities' bumbling attempts to address it.

That novel, like his father's "The Off-Islanders", was also made into a successful motion picture the following year.

You may have heard of it.

It was called "Jaws".

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight Night.