If half of whatвІ s listed about their lives in online bios is true, the price of Alexandrov and OrlovaвІ s success was a constant paranoia that left her an insomniac recluse and must have left the aged Alexandrov marveling at his survival when so many around him did not. The charm of Volga-Volga and of moments in the other films was produced in a fearful atmosphere that could not have been more diametrically opposed. It is a tribute to Alexandrov and Orlova that the films are as good as they are-- but no film is charming enough to justify the times in which it is made, and few are charming enough to entirely overcome such thoughts while watching them.
Alexandrov still manages some visual grace notes-- he does some charming tricks with rear projection, including having Orlova do a duet with herself in a mirror-- but all in all itвІ s a long slog that confirms all your worst suspicions of the Soviet sense of entertainment. Though Orlova was a treasured figure for the rest of her life, The Shining Path was the climax of her career; younger musical stars replaced her and she and Alexandrov had a film banned in 1943; it would be 1947 before a 45-year-old Orlova reappeared on screen in a more mature dramatic role. She died in 1975, and AlexandrovвІ s last film work was a 1983 documentary about her.
Alas, once in the mill, the movie turns into a hymn to the Stakhanovite Soviet worker, its emotional turning point being a telegram from Comrade Molotov himself!, and thereвІ s a long slog through Kate Smith-level anthems of productivity that somehow wraps up with Orlova singing from a flying car over Moscow (proof that scientists of the peopleвІ s revolution invented Flubber decades before decadent, absent-minded American scientists) and her and her engineer beau strolling through the Agricultural Exhibition at the Moscow WorldвІ s Fair. I kid you not.
Volga-VolgaвІ as its music to do stretches and push-ups to-- and a sequence of a nighttime ice-skating party is as lushly romantic and beautifully shot as anything Hollywood ever did.
Originally meant to be titled Cinderella (until Stalin vetoed it and suggested his own title), 1940's The Shining Path* has Orlova as a scullery maid whose Cinderella story involves not a prince but a handsome engineer and a job at a local mill. The first half, detailing her rise, is charming and amusing-- we first see her doing her chores to a radio exercise program which, amusingly, uses вІ
The last of the Orlova films I saw shows AlexandrovвІ s filmmaking skills finally reaching a level of gloss and ingenuity the equal of anything Hollywood could produce at the time-- but alas, it also shows the heavy hand of Stalinism finally extinguishing the fun of these kinds of movies. (Even by the time of Volga-Volga, Boris Shumiatski, the studio chief who had moved Soviet film toward entertainment over propaganda, had been shot in the Great Purge, as had the filmвІ s cinematographer.)
I just canвІ t visualize it.вІ)
But what talent do you have?вІ (ThatвІ s basically the same gag as when the studio chief in SinginвІ in the Rain, at the end of a stunning 10-minute dance number, says вІ
AlexandrovвІ s sense of comedy construction is much sharpened by now, even if the editor is still working too hard to get laughs at times, in a way that tends to distance us from the characters. But even if only half the comedy travels and the end is so full of reversals that I lost track of who or why, Volga-Volga has a buoyant spirit and a cheery picture of the river itself thatвІ s pretty irresistible-- one cheeky gag has Orlova demonstrating (perfectly) the talents of everyone else in the town to the dyspeptic bureaucrat, only to have him declare, вІ
The initial setting is a small town, where a bureaucrat mainly interested in credit for himself (Stalin must have known plenty of those) is ordered to send a musical delegation to Moscow. HeвІ s convinced that the cowtown heвІ s been sent to has nothing of value to offer, but Orlova, the local letter-carrier, writes a folk song to the Volga river and eventually manages to get it performed to great success (I just glided over an enormous number of complications which, frankly, I doubt I could reconstruct a mere day later, involving a classical musician boyfriend she quarrels with, the loss of sheet music and the adoption of the song by other townsвІ orchestras, a fictitious authoress, a steamboat race, etc., etc.)
She was clearly recognized for having been the most promising thing in the movie, because she was shortly put in what sounds like the kind of starring vehicle Irene Dunne or Barbara Stanwyck would have made if theyвІ d lived in the USSR. In The Circus, Orlova plays an American performer whoвІ s given birth to a black baby and been forced by the resulting scandal to flee racist America; but of course the racism-free Soviet Union embraces her. Unfortunately I missed The Circus, but I caught what was perhaps her biggest hit, and the movie that Stalin apparently loved the way Howard Hughes loved Ice Station Zebra: 1938's Volga-Volga. (He sent FDR a print.)
In the midst of all this craziness that is more inexplicable than funny, Orlova pops up as a pigtailed maid, and her presence grounds the movie in a human reality it otherwise has no concept of, even if itвІ s moving too fast to no particular purpose to take advantage of her. Here, she looks like Ginger Rogers-- or like Ginger Rogers would in seven or eight years-- but listen and her high-pitched voice and what-the-hell manner are more Carole Lombard than anybody else. A Soviet screwball queen was born.
The best gag in the movie is the one that starts it: caricatures of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, followed by the announcement that they arenвІ t in the movie. The Jolly Fellows aims for a Mack Sennett level of madcap comedy, and is faithful to that inspiration, not an entirely positive development for something that runs 90 minutes rather than 10. A dinner party interrupted by shepherd UtyosovвІ s livestock is pretty funny, an all-out brawl among the jazz band produces cartoon mayhem as unmotivated and random as a Van Beuren short. Mostly Alexandrov seems to still think heвІ s making silents, and itвІ s hard for actors to gain a comic foothold when the editor is trying so hard to be funny. (There is one great silent movie moment-- out of place but really a wonderful naturalistic moment-- in which the camera tracks along ordinary beachgoers, catching a dozen little character vignettes and moments of unforced observation. It belongs in a better movie.)
The movie that gave her her break was 1934вІ s The Jolly Fellows, also known in the decadent West as Moscow Laughs. The star is one Leonid Utyosov, apparently the most popular jazz band leader of the Soviet era, which admittedly may be a small field; his biography online sounds far more interesting than his persona in the movie, which suggests Eddie Cantor with a splash of Harpo Marx. (Which, at least, is nearly all the overt Marxism in the movie.)
By that time she had already lost one husband to the purges (later, when she and Stalin were drinking buddies, she dared ask Joe what had happened to him; she was told he was alive in the Gulag and, in fact, if she kept asking questions, maybe it could be arranged for her to join him). Her second husband was her cinematic discoverer, EisensteinвІ s old assistant Grigori Alexandrov, and it was he who would guide her career, break the alcoholism that had followed the arrest of her first husband, and make her into the most beloved actress of her time-- enough that a of her work has now been put together to give us in the West a rare glimpse of Stalin-era popular, rather than art, cinema.
The Russian Alice Faye, the Soviet Mary Pickford, a Ginger Rogers or Garbo for the workers... Hollywood duchesses really come from working class Pittsburgh, so itвІ s fitting, perhaps, that Lyubov Orlova, the most popular musical star of the Stalinist era, famous for playing proles who made good, came from the aristocracy and rose through the elite artistic institutions of Moscow before getting her break playing a servant girl in the mid-1930s.
Lyubov Orlova, Stalin's Glamor Queen
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