Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.

Combining cinematic and diplomatic history, this article examines a curious relic of the détente phase of the Cold War, the fantasy-musical The Blue Bird . Released on the silver screen in 1976, The Blue Bird was the only U.S.-Soviet cinematic coproduction during the Cold War. The movie was made for a variety of commercial, artistic, and ideological reasons but failed to live up to expectations. The production was shambolic, critics were disdainful, and the film was a dud at the box office. The Blue Bird is largely forgotten nowadays, but the story of the film's production and reception sheds valuable light on the economics and politics of cross-bloc filmmaking. It also provides insight into the importance of cinema as an instrument of public diplomacy at the height of détente.

This article examines Cold War film propaganda in the 1950s, when the cin-ema was enjoying its last period as the dominant visual mass entertainment form in both the West and the East. I concentrates on the role that religion played as a theme of propaganda primarily in British and American movies, as well as some of the Soviet films released during the decade. The article ex-plores the relationship between film output and state propagandists to show how religious themes were incorporated into films dealing with Cold War is-sues, and considers how audiences received the messages contained within these films. The article therefore builds on recent scholarship that highlights the importance of ideas and culture during the Cold War by looking at the adoption and adaptation of religion as a tool of propaganda.

This article examines the relationship between politics and culture in Great Britain and the United States during the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The article critically examines several recent books on British and American Cold War cultural activities, both domestic and external. The review covers theatrical, cinematic, literary, and broadcast propaganda and analyzes the complex network of links between governments and private groups in commerce, education, labor markets, and the mass entertainment media. It points out the fundamental differences between Western countries and the Soviet bloc and provides a warning to those inclined to view Western culture solely through a Cold War prism.