One of our few extravagances when I was a child was movies. Not going, not usually, but our VHS collection, which was probably one of the largest of any of my friends’ families. Sometimes, these would be movies we loved as a family or movies that my sisters or I would request, but mostly, they were movies of which my mother was fond. A lot of John Wayne. The entire Thin Man collection. And The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! I was familiar with a lot of the people in it from other things, but for me, this is the Cold War comedy most worth frequent rewatch.

First, though, was the book—which I first read for this column. A Russian submarine is offshore of a small and sandy island off the coast of Cape Cod. Unfortunately, small and sandy islands tend to involve sandbars, and the sub gets stuck on one. The captain sends a group of men to procure a boat to help get the sub off the bar. The island population is now down to the regulars, the season having ended. The school’s football team broke a losing streak the night before, and the town is celebrating. Olin Leveridge is technically from away, but he’s been living on the island for years, claiming to be an artist but actually doing odd jobs around town. He’s on his way to one of these jobs, having forgotten it’s Sunday, when he encounters the Russians.

From there, we run about, meeting various Russians and wacky islanders, watching how everyone handles the situation they’re in. One of the Russians sent on the expedition, in part because of his English but in part because he thinks it might end with promotion, is the political officer, who keeps insisting on killing islanders. Another is a big thug. One seems okay but turns out to not, and one has learned English from American magazines and probably knows more about the US than his compatriots.

In the movie, we have Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), a writer. He and his family, including wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint) and kids Pete (Sheldon Collins) and Annie (Sidney Putnam), are packing to go home at the end of the season along with the help of Alison (Andrea Dromm). This is where the Russians appear. The leader of the landing party, Rozanov (Alan Arkin in his first major film role, for which he was nominated for an Oscar), kidnaps the man he calls “Whittakerwalt” and makes him help with the search for a boat.

We still have wacky islanders, albeit a different crew this time. We focus on, among others, the sheriff (Brian Keith), his lead deputy (Jonathan Winters), the town drunk (Ben Blue), and the operator (Tessie O’Shea). Alison falls in love with young Alexei (John Phillip Law). There’s a worker at the airport for two minutes played by a young Michael J. Pollard. We lose the plot with the political officer, because we don’t really see any of the Russians interacting with one another. Probably because the book can get away with giving us the Russian in translation, except for—I assume—expletives. The movie really can’t, and when we see the Russians talk amongst themselves, it’s in untranslated Russian.

This is an odd book for the Cold War. It’s far less nihilistic than the Cold War comedy that’s overwhelmed the conversation; this one ends on a happier note. Two, actually; book and movie end differently, but in both cases, they end happily. I’m not sure the movie could have gotten away with some of how the book ends, and it’s true that the movie ending is considerably more cinematic. Though everyone I know who’s seen the movie agrees that, had it been Pete Whittaker up on that tower, we would’ve let him fall.

This is another case where book and movie are very different and both worthwhile. The basic plot outline of the movie remains the same, but the particulars have changed a fair amount. The characters are mostly different. As I said, we lose most of the Russian details and gain the Whittakers, but there’s also a romance in the book between a local who repairs boats in the summer and makes do as he can in the winter who is in love with the off-islander school teacher, and most of the islander characters are given more personality. I’m pretty sure the captain never gets a name in either, though, and let me throw out a compliment for Theodore Bikel in the role.

I actually had to look a detail from the book up, while I read it. One of the characters is tired of the political officer’s lecturing. He tells her that there is no need to kill people in a communist society. She tells him she’ll believe it when she hears it from Lavrenti Beria. Who turns out to have been a big deal under Stalin who was executed under Khrushchev after having orders actual damn genocides. The political officer tells her not to believe everything she reads in American newspapers, but that’s not much of an argument in my opinion.

The book was written by a fellow named Nathaniel Benchley. His father, Robert, was a writer and actor who was one of the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. His son, too, wrote a book set in the general vicinity of Cape Cod, if I’m not mistaken, though I’ll confess I’ve never read it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie made of it, though some people seem to like it. Peter’s book had something to do with sharks. Funny that his book went the opposite way of his father’s; this book was intended to make the Russians look less dangerous than people assumed they were.

Next month, we’ll be exploring two books in one with Return to Oz, the ‘80s amalgam of The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz. So give me a little of that treasure by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!