Cinema: Hopalong Cossack

Soviet moviemakers know their box office. Copenhagen audiences last week were seeing a Soviet-made horse opera that managed to combine cowboys with horse racing and a hearty helping of World War II anti-German propaganda, all wrapped lumpily into ten reels. The story of Kosakhest (Cossack Horse): A Cossack cowboy enters his horse in a race against a jockey who is after the cowboy’s girl. But war begins and the jockey turns out to be a saboteur who escapes to Nazi lines after wounding the cowboy. The clever horse, who apparently can do everything but dance the Kazachek, saves the cowboy’s life, then helps him blow up a train full of German officers and the jockey as well. In the nick of time, the cowboy uncouples the baggage car in which his girl is held prisoner. Last reel: cowboy rides horse in big race, sets new record, wins trophy at fadeout in front of huge, beaming portrait of J. Stalin.

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In Moscow itself, the most popular foreign films, reported the New York Times, are Tarzan and Tarzan in the West, both of which are carefully presented to audiences with a Soviet explanation: Tarzan was cast ashore in Africa as an infant and raised by apes “without the slightest contact with pernicious bourgeois American or English influences.”