I visit elderly shut-ins. Yesterday, instead of us puttering in her garden, one old gal that I visit insisted we spectate at television programming. She wanted to watch a 2019 movie from Poland called Mr. Jones.
Although filmed in Poland and crewed by Poles, this award-winning movie is in English.
Sub-titles are available for hard-of-hearing folks.
The script, acting, costumes, sets, and production values are equal or better than anything from ‘major Hollywood* studios’.
Based on historical events, I strongly recommend it, and yet… I hesitate to recommend it.
Although well-made, several minutes of this were very difficult for me to watch.
Set in the early-1930s, Mr. Jones covers a few years of a bright-eyed Welsh cub-reporter.
His specialty is the old Russia and the new ‘Soviet Union’. Knowing the Bolshevik thugs are flat-broke after burning through the Czar’s treasury with their extravagant self-indulgences, our protagonist questions the Bolshevik’s financial resources to build hundreds of new factories to produce millions of tons of war-making equipment such as bombers and tanks.
Sometime around 1931, Jones travels from England to Moscow in hopes of interviewing Stalin.
In Moscow, he discovers all foreign reporters are housed in all-expenses-paid extravagant decadence in the swankiest hotel in all the land. The reporters receive enormous stipends from the Soviet bureaucrats/thugs, and are furnished massive amounts of drugs and prostitutes to indulge as they wish. Grand restaurants are included in their ‘all-you-can-eat’ easy posting.
As you might imagine, this pay-and-play influences the articles and columns they wire home to their employing newspapers.
The result?
None of their governments — British, American, Japan, Australian, German, and globally — have any accurate information about the intentions/abilities of the Bolshevik bureaucrats/thugs.
After inquiring about the source of the incredible new Soviet wealth, his visa suddenly restricted to a few hours before he must leave for England. Our protagonist finagles an impromptu — and non-chaperoned — train-ride to the Ukraine. History buffs can predict his experiences in the Ukraine.
These sequences were extremely difficult for me.
After Soviet bureaucrats/thugs arrest and expel him, he tours England to give speeches about the Ukraine. Tragically, his devastating first-hand accounts are the exact opposite of the glowing reports posted by all the other reporters virtually imprisoned in their high-end Moscow hotel while plied with unlimited booze, drugs, enthusiastic prostitutes of all persuasions… and significant amounts of cash and precious metals.
I hesitate to recommend Mr. Jones while I strongly feel this movie is a ‘must-watch’.
An aside:
I wonder if Bolsheviks in our nation’s capitol harbor secret dreams about committing similar Crimes Against Humanity against Americans in remote snowy regions.
How could such a tragedy happen to many millions of people in the Ukraine?
After requiring registration, the Bolshevik ‘December Decree’ of 1918 prohibited all private firearms. As SurvivalBlog cynics probably anticipated, the December Decree exempted “Members Of The Party.”