From the 1960s until the collapse of Communism, the most famous musicians in the Soviet Bloc were not Elvis Presley, John Lennon, or a Communist Party hack. It’s a U.S.-born, former teen idol from Denver named Dean Reed. In the Eastern Bloc, Dean sold out stadiums, preached Marxism, and inspired a generation. Along the way, he plotted a revolution with Che Guevara, talked poetry with Pablo Neruda, and was lauded by Nikita Khrushchev. For the top brass, he was a propaganda coup; for the Communist youth, he was their “Red Elvis”… until his body was found floating in a lake in East Berlin, dead at age 47. Thomas Latter’s RED ELVIS: COLD WAR COWBOY (2022, 90 min) is the story of a wild and changing world. German with English subs.

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