In 1945, Anna Bedford, a young American journalist from a farming family in Pennsylvania is assigned to work at the U.S. Embassy in the Soviet Union.
A new ambassador, General Walter Scott, arrives at the embassy, bringing a directive that all staff must focus exclusively on intelligence gathering and anti-Soviet activities: "Peace is merely a short interval allowed for preparation for the next war, which will establish the American way of life worldwide."
Amid the lies and suspicion, she finds an ally in Armand Howard, the embassy's information department head, who refuses to compromise the truth.
Anna is summoned back to Moscow and tasked with writing a fabricated book about oppression in the Soviet Union and falsely claiming Howard’s murder was orchestrated by communists.
The uncovered footage ends here, but the script reveals that Anna later becomes a Soviet citizen and publishes an exposé about the activities of American diplomats.
The planned finale would mirror the iconic scene from Circus, with Anna marching through Red Square among celebratory crowds during a national holiday.
[12] In February 1950, speaking before the committee that was accepting the script, Dovzhenko said that he wanted to make a film about Americans, describing them as the "antipodes" of Soviet reality.
As Dmitriev recalled, this decision had opponents, primarily because the film was unfinished, not typical of Dovzhenko's style, and openly politically biased.
[19] Dovzhenko, who is regarded as creating several classic Soviet movies, took on a topic that was completely alien to him by shooting a political film.
[23][24] Attempts to follow ideological instructions and censorship requirements, multiple rewrites of the script yielded nothing and broke the director.
[23][25] Characteristic of Soviet cinema of that era was the depiction of the United States as an ideological enemy during the beginning of the arms race and the Cold War.
Yuri Lyubimov, whose worldview and actions were greatly influenced by the biography of Anabella Bukar, even before the Decree on the deprivation of his citizenship and forced emigration from the USSR, in his recorded memoirs of the 1960s said that Stalin, allegedly, having looked through the list of films in production in 1951, remarked: "If she [Bukar] betrayed her homeland, then she can betray the new one too," and crossed the film out of the plans.
In fact, this is no longer satire, but a lampoon of American society: the embassy workers are portrayed as complete idiots, cynics and drunks.