Made in 1943, Mission to Moscow was later cited by HUAC, inaugurating the Hollywood witch hunt and leading to the blacklisting of screenwriter Howard Koch. Jack Warner claims that it was made at the behest of FDR in order to generate American support for the Soviet Union as against Germany and Japan, but this is a matter of some debate. Directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce), the film is a dramatic account of prewar politics in the USSR based on the book, “Mission to Moscow,” by former ambassador to Russia Joseph E. Davies. (Davies is played by Walter Huston in the film proper, but it is the real Davies who provides the film's prologue.) As a work of art, Mission to Moscow can be dismissed without great difficulty; caricatures of Stalin, FDR, Churchill and others are further burdened by a script which is enlivened only by the montages of Don Siegel (an “action editor” before he became an action director) and James Leicester. But as a piece of anti-Nazi, pro-commie propaganda, it should not be missed; the rose-colored view of life under communism presented here is unequaled in Hollywood cinema and, while it was made in all earnestness, provides no little comedy on viewing the film now. Nora Sayre comments: “In no other film have I seen so many spinning globes--the props most essential to Mission to Moscow; again and again, world leaders pensively twirl the spheres on their desks while asserting that peace (or war) is possible....” Sayre also notes that Davies, a firm believer in capitalism, denounced Stalin's police state (if not Stalin himself) which the film does not. James Agee called Mission to Moscow “the first Soviet production to come from a major American studio.”