in 1939, as the clouds of war gathered in Europe, two contrasting movie heroines were ripped away from small family farms by impressively staged windstorms and transported to fantastic foreign lands filled with magic and peril, from which, after many trials, each was glad to return to her cherished homeland. The American-made The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) and the Soviet-made Vasilisa prekrasnaia (Vasilisa the Beautiful, dir. Aleksandr Rou, 1939) both adapted fairy-tale characters and storylines that were already, in one way or another, deeply embedded within their national cultures, with each further inflecting its source material in response to current events unfolding upon the world stage.
These big-budget, technically ambitious fantasies, produced concurrently in two of the world's largest and most populous nations, offered their viewers some dramatically opposed perspectives on ideas relating to home and abroad, ambition and duty, and the legitimacy of personal...
