Russian Americans' in Soviet Film by Marina L. Levitina

Author:Marina L. Levitina [Levitina, Marina L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Film & Video, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780857727701
Google: Ry-oDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-09-29T22:29:50+00:00

Figure 17. Judy and Aniuta, from Daddy-Long-Legs and Happy Guys

The script for Happy Guys was written by Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass, ‘the best stage satirists of their time.’54 Its prototype was Leonid Utesov’s most successful jazz show The Music Store (1932), also written by Mass and Erdman. The film embodied ‘the combination of Erdman and Mass’ comic-satirical figuration of Soviet contemporaneity and Alexandrov’s cache of American comedy tropes.’55 The plot was built around Kostia Potekhin (Leonid Utesov), a shepherd who learns to play jazz music and who, in a series of gags and complications, is mistaken for a foreign conductor and ends up performing on the stage of the Bolshoi. Aniuta, Orlova’s heroine, falls in love with Kostia from the moment she hears him sing his optimistic song ‘The March of the Happy Guys.’ Initially Kostia’s love interest is Lena with her grotesquely bourgeois values and interests; however, after meeting the inebriated Aniuta on the stage of the Bolshoi and witnessing her singing talent, Kostia reciprocates her love.

The reason for Aniuta’s intoxication is that she is forced to drink some vodka so as to warm up during a heavy rainstorm (she explains that she does not normally drink alcohol). When she subsequently enters the Bolshoi Theatre, a close-up reveals the simplicity and ‘girlish’ naivety of her facial expression, reminiscent of the expression of Pickford as Judy in the scene in Daddy-Long-Legs where she and her small friend accidentally become intoxicated after drinking alcohol. This naivety of Orlova’s Aniuta was seen as a positive trait by a contemporary critic who, in her review of Happy Guys, noted that while Orlova was ‘too graceful and delicate’ to portray a peasant girl, she ‘wonderfully depicts the feelings of a naïve and very young girl, in a fresh and simple way; such feelings are familiar to hundreds of young women.’56

This girlish quality was a common trait of Orlova’s heroines in Alexandrov’s comedies. Both Pickford’s and Orlova’s characters have been described as unerotic and non-sexual. We have already noted this quality in the case of Pickford’s screen persona.57 This apparent lack of sexual appeal in Pickford’s image (as opposed to the ‘vamps’ such as, for example, Theda Bara) was seen as positive by the Soviet critics in the 1920s, who called for ‘simple, almost not pretty’ faces in women representing the New Soviet Woman.58 Stalin, the main ‘Kremlin Censor’ of cinema,59 disliked displays of sexuality on the screen,60 which had major repercussions for representations of gender relations in Soviet cinema for decades to come. Maia Turovskaia has described Orlova as continually having to ‘conceal her healthy sexuality under the guise of a simpleton.’61 The Russian film critic Sergei Nikolaevich compared Orlova to Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.62 While this description might apply to one particular heroine of Orlova, Marion Dixon in Circus, the comparison does not apply to the rest of her characters in Alexandrov’s comedies, who were largely presented as unerotic. Instead of sexual appeal, Orlova’s screen heroines possessed a delicate angelic quality, best expressed in her voice and in what was seen as her angelic beauty.

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