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Much to the frustration of the American contingent, in the end it, too, failed to show in Moscow. Its scheduled presentation was abruptly canceled by the Soviets without official explanation. Informally the authorities stated that the film was considered “American propaganda” by “high-level” Soviet viewers.⁴¹ This incensed Valenti, who had been assigned by the State Department to oversee American activities at the festival. “If the portrayal of young, wholesome Americans as they tour the United States giving concerts, climaxed by appearances in patriotic settings in Washington, is propaganda, then this was ‘propaganda,’ and about as good as could be found,” Valenti wrote to Washington. “But it was, first of all, an excellent motion picture.”⁴² While Valenti believed The Young Americans’ cancellation was ultimately a coup for the United States—the “meaning of the cancellation was not lost on Festival delegations or the world press, and thus the indirect effect was to benefit the United States,” he concluded—the MPAA chief was in fact being shortsighted. The censorship may have redounded to Washington internationally, but it had no discernible effect on the Soviet citizenry, who viewed the festival films by the hundreds of thousands.⁴³ The most effective propaganda, of course, is that which does not appear as such. If the principal reason for the American film industry’s investment in Moscow was “90% political,” as Valenti wrote to Secretary of State William Rogers, he failed to fully appreciate that the showing of Bruce Brown’s film, with its implicitly positive representations of the United States as a confident and courageous nation of economic abundance, would almost certainly have resonated with the Soviet people, as it had with countless Americans.⁴⁴ The Endless Summer, from this perspective, would have been a more inspired choice in 1967.