Who could have guessed we could nearly sell out a large auditorium at BAM for a 67-year-old Hollywood epic praising Joseph Stalin’s praises that is available on DVD and airing on TV next Wednesday? Thanks to everyone who made last night’s screening of “Mission to Moscow” a success, including a very engaged audience that had great questions afterwards. We even got a revisionist history lesson from Mia Grosjean, granddaughter of protagonist Joseph E. Davies, whose parents are played in the film by Eleanor Parker and Richard Travis. Our top-notch panel included the sardonic Glenn Kenny (who recited the lyrics of a Stalin-praising novelty song by the Golden Gate Quartet) Ed Hulse (an incredibly knowlegable film author who I never met before) and of course, The Self-Styled Siren herself, Farran Smith Nehme, authorative and unflappable in her public debut as a film critic. Thanks, too, to Jake Perlin and Gabriele Caroti at BAM, who promoted the hell out of the event, and, representing our very supportive co-sponsors, Gina McKenzie at Turner Classic Movies and Ronnee Sass at Warner Home Video (which has made the title available on DVD at warnerarchive.com.) The “Shadows of Russia” Trans-Soviet express rolls on tonight at TCM with five more movies, beginning with King Vidor’s only screwball comedy, “Comrade X” (1940). With a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht (possibly assisted by an uncredited Herman Mankiewicz), this story of an American reporter (Clark Gable) who agrees to smuggle a loyal Communist streetcar conductor (Hedy Lamarr) out of Russia offers some unexpected pointed satire, particularly when the two of them are thrown into jail. (More at The Siren’s series overview at Moving Image Source). “Comrade X” was, of course, inspired by MGM’s success the previous year with “Ninotchka,” whose writers include not only Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett by Walter Reisch, who received an Oscar nomination for the original story of “Comrade X.” My long-ago film appreciation professor at CCNY, Herman Weinberg, insists in his book “The Lubitsch Touch” that Ernst was allowed to direct “Ninotchka” as the first in a two-picture deal with MGM as a consolation prize after being removed from the helm of “The Women,” which George Cukor took over after following his dismissal from “Gone With the Wind.” I’ve never seen any support for this elsewhere, however. Cary Grant, who had nonexclusive contracts at RKO and Columbia, turned down the chance to play Greta Garbo’s male lead in her penultimate flick. After briefly considering William Powell, it became arguably the most memorable role of the great Melvyn Douglas, who was jointly under contract to MGM and Columbia. Douglas returned to Columbia the following year to play a Communist in “He Stayed for Breakfast,” which is not in our series. Comrade Kenny wrote yesterday at The Auteurs about a pair of oddly mirrored airborne “Ninotchka” knockoffs, Josef von Sternberg’s “Jet Pilot” (made 1950, released 1958) with John Wayne and Janet Leigh and Ralph Thomas’ famously unavailable “The Iron Petticoat” (1956) with Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn. When the latter two stars died within a month of each other in 2003, I contacted Hope’s longtime press rep to ask who owned “The Iron Petticoat.” The guy told me that though Hope was a producer, Hope’s staff not figure out who controlled the U.S. rights, let alone even locate a copy. So I referred them to a grey marketeer in Saskatoon, British Columbia, who sells dubs of the U.K. release reviewed by Glenn. And then, of course, there’s “Silk Stockings,” the Cole Porter musical based on “Ninotchka” starring Cyd Charisse and Peter Lorre (Bela Lugosi receives prominent billing in “Ninotchka” for his last non-horror role, but most of his scenes were unfortunately cut). Getting back to films actually showing on TCM tonight, at midnight EST, the series will turn to campus leftists with Sidney Pollack’s decades-spanning “The Way We Were” starring Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford, which I admit I haven’t seen all the way through since its run at the old Loews Orpheum way back in 1973. That will be followed at 2:15 by the most obscure title in the series, “Spring Madness” (1938) with Lew Ayres, Maureen O’Sullivan and Burgess Meredith as college students planning a trip to Russia. Directed by my pal Susan Granger’s dad, the underrated S. Sylvan Simon, and based on a short-lived play by Philip Barry (“The Philadelphia Story”), this MGM B picture is part of a forgotten subgenre of campus Commie comedies that includes William A. Seiter’s “Red Salute” with Barbara Stanwyck and Hecht and Charles McArthur’s “Soak the Rich,” two 1935 releases which were also on the wish list The Siren and I submitted to TCM. They weren’t available, but those great TCM programmers did throw in a fifth film tonight as a bonus: Stuart Rosenberg’s rarely-shown “The Strawberry Statement” (1970), loosely based on a once-popular autobiographical novel by James Simon Kunen, who participated in the famous 1968 student protests at Columbia University. A very young Bruce Davison stars as a student who joins up with radicals to make it with Kim Darby, a common romantic ploy in those days if memory serves. I haven’t seen this one since a pre-release screening for college journalists at the old Baronet. Even if it isn’t better than I dimly remember, it’s no doubt interesting as a period piece.