Long ago, I watched the bonus features on a DVD of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (Иваново детство). They interviewed the guy who played Ivan, and he said that as a kid he was surprised he got the role because he didn't think he looked Russian. He thought he looked like an American kid.
So, if we take Nikolai Burlyayev's thoughts as a 12-years-old to heart, there is such a thing as being "Russian-looking" but some Russians look American,
Now, first I have to admit, I confused Eve Arden with June Lockhart. Lockhart played the mother on Lost in Space. This entry was supposed flow naturally from the last post about Lost In Space. But now it's just random.
In 1944, Eve Arden appeared in a movie called The Doughgirls playing Sgt. Natalia Moskoroff, the least Russian-looking Russian I've ever seen in a movie.
The movie was a comedy about some Army women staying at a hotel in Washington, DC. There's also a Soviet woman soldier there played by Arden. She was a sniper who had killed hundreds of Nazis, apparently based on Soviet Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko who was credited with killing 309 (it's believed the actual number was over 600.)
So Eve Arden makes a lot of bad jokes about how Russian women all kill Nazis. Her mother would kill a couple before breakfast each morning.
I'm not really going anywhere with this. So here's a video from a fairly recent Russian movie about Lyudmila Pavlichenko set to music by Woody Guthrie:
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