East Meets West on the Silver Screen

Ralph Porter is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Alla Nazimova or Sergei Eisenstein. But not too many years ago, Porter, a soft-core porn director in New York City, was practically as good as it got when it came to film links between the United States and the then-Soviet Union. Or, as he was wont to cry out to cronies who visited his gimcrack sets for the shooting of a striptease scene: “Pay attention to how I do this! Exactly like I learned from Pudovkin!”

Blame World War II alliances for Ralph Porter’s encounters with Vsevolod Pudovkin in a military propaganda unit. But, too, blame 70 years of Red Scare, Cold War, and rival Superpowerdom for the fact that, as recently as 10 years ago, Porter was an almost idiosyncratic case of an American with some direct experience of Russian film making. Indeed, his only competition was a few actors and technicians surviving from a disastrous 1976 coproduction The Blue Bird. As symbols of cooperation went, The Blue Bird was a model harbinger of unhappiness, off the screen as much as on it. There were daily bulletins from St Petersburg about Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Ava Gardner getting sick on Russian food or throwing tantrums over the work habits of Russian crews. 

While probably the worst, The Blue Bird was not the only instance of American-Soviet film relations. In the late 1920s, for example, just around the time that the world was dipping into the Great Depression and Joseph Stalin was preparing to plunge the USSR into an even greater one, another note altogether was sounded with the release of the Soviet production of The Kiss of Mary Pickford. The only purely Russian film to have prominent Americans in its cast, Kiss was a comedy inspired by the enormous popularity of Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks in Europe – an acclaim that prompted mob scenes whenever the couple toured the continent. The picture tells the story of a ticket taker (Igor Ilinsky) in a Moscow moviehouse who, when he isn’t admitting people to see Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro, is competing with the Hollywood star’s swashbuckling image for his girl’s affections. When he learns about a visit to Moscow by Pickford and Fairbanks, the ticket taker decides to see what his rival is made of in person and, through a succession of misadventures, ends up with the actress, receives a kiss on the cheek from her, and is almost trampled to death by a crowd of autograph seekers. His reaction? “How can a man kissed by Mary Pickford not be okay?” The kiss elevates the hero in the eyes of his girl, and the pair live happily ever after.

The Kiss of Mary Pickford was made during a relatively benign period in US-USSR relations, before the full onset of the Stalin persecutions. But it was at the height of the purges in the 1930s that Hollywood, especially Walt Disney, served as the midwife for that durable Soviet film character, the Happy Tractor Driver. Determined to emulate Mussolini and Hitler in using the film medium as an instrument for consolidating his position, Stalin dispatched Boris Shumyatsky, chairman of the State Film Trust, to the U.S. in 1935 for a first-hand study of the formula that had brought the American motion picture industry international success. Shumyatsky, an apparatchik of no particular distinction, concluded that Hollywood owed its power to its cartoons and musicals – not only because these genres diverted audiences from the grim realities of the Depression, but also because their underlying moralistic outlook had a worldwide appeal (and also just so happened to jibe with the priorities of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan). 

It was on the basis of this finding that Stalin gave the state trust a green light to churn out Tractor Drivers, The Rich Bride, Volga-Volga, and innumerable other treacly melodramas that emphasized what a subsequent age would call “positive values.”

Another significant meeting ground for the two film industries was the work of Sergei Eisenstein. At one point in the 1920s, the director’s sophisticated montage cutting so impressed American moviemakers that they kept metronomes on sets and in editing rooms to be sure they were adhering to his rhythms. In light of such admiration, it was hardly surprising that Hollywood kept after Eisenstein to work there, or that he eventually accepted an invitation from Paramount in 1930. What followed was fiasco atop debacle. First, Paramount rejected the director’s proposals for screen adaptations of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Blaise Cendrars’s Gold. Then novelist Upton Sinclair and other initially enthusiastic backers pulled the plug midway through Eisenstein’s attempt to shoot an impressionistic history of Mexico entitled Que Viva Mexico! Not only was the filmmaker stranded in Mexico when U.S. Immigration officials refused to allow him back over the border, but, despite promises to the contrary, he never got to see the considerable footage he had shot and sent to Sinclair in California. As one wag at the time put it, the idea of Eisenstein was far more palatable to Hollywood than Eisenstein himself.

Or, almost. In the bowels of McCarthyism 20 years later, even the idea of Eisenstein came under attack from hacks dedicated to identifying film history totally with Hollywood. In a series of articles published by Films in Review in the early 1950s, for example, Seymour Stern discerned a communist plot in attempts to praise Eisenstein at the expense of D.W. Griffith. Stern claimed that it was Griffith who had given the Soviets “the capacity of their cinema to convey thought.” After asserting that absolutely every memorable image in an Eisenstein work had been inspired by Griffith (e.g., the Teutonic Knights from the Ku Klux Klan), Stern concluded: “It can truthfully be said that a credit for Sergei Eisenstein is a credit for D.W. Griffith.”

But it has been neither in such puerile polemics nor in the isolated examples of The Blue Bird and The Kiss of Mary Pickford that the U.S. and USSR were most cognizant of each other in the film medium for most of this century. Far more significant have been the performers and directors who abandoned the Soviet Union for America, bringing with them new artistic precepts, and the characterizations the two countries offered of one another on the screen.

With regard to individual artists, the most prominent Russian to appear before a Hollywood camera was probably the first one – Alla Nazimova. Already a legendary star of the Russian stage before arriving in New York City in 1905, Nazimova was also the first of many Russians who brought along the theatrical aesthetics and acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Nazimova had studied with Stanislavsky in Moscow. The great director’s influence on American film and theater would become profound several decades later, notably with the Group Theater in the 1930s and with the Actors Studio from the late 1940s to the present day. 

After some years on Broadway, where she gained particular renown for her interpretations of Ibsen, Nazimova debuted before the cameras in the 1916 production of War Brides. Based on a sketch that she had been doing on the stage, War Brides cast the actress as a pregnant wife who organizes other women aainst the military training of their husbands, then ends up shooting herself to dramatize her belief that anyone who joins the Army will become cannon fodder.

In one of the last pacifist films produced before America’s entry into World War I, War Brides, allusions to being set in a European monarchy were variously deciphered as belonging to the Kaiser’s Germany or the Russia of the Romanovs. But if the latter, it was about the closest that Nazimova ever came to taking on a Russian screen character. Mostly, she played either classic heroines like Camille and Salome or an adventuress who took too big a bite out of fate and was lucky if she attained redemption before being throttled, stabbed, or shot. But whatever the role, Nazimova attacked it with an extravagant style that was frequently bizarre, sometimes grotesque, and almost always suggestive of a grand dame. And although she didn’t portray Russians specifically, the flourishes she gave to her roles helped consolidate an image of romantic expansiveness for Russians disenfranchised by the October Revolution.

It was Nazimova’s stylized acting, even more than her accent, that eventually worked against her with the advent of sound. She stayed away from the screen for the entire 1930s, not returning until the 1940 melodrama Escape, in which she appeared as an elderly German aristocrat. She played similar dowager roles of various nationalities until her death in 1945.

Two other notable Russians – Olga Baclanova and Maria Ouspenskaya – found their way to Hollywood after defecting from a 1923 tour of the Moscow Art Theater in the U.S. Like Nazimova, Baclanova and Ouspenskaya were both steeped in the methods of Stanislavsky and devoted their first years in America to stage work. Following a bit part in a 1928 production of The Dove, Baclanova appeared later the same year as the female star of a leaden morality tale, Street of Sin, then went on to make several similar features over the next few years. As in the case of Nazimova, her outsized acting dated her in talkies; her only noteworthy appearance in the sound era was as a trapeze artist who marries a circus midget for his money in the cult classic Freaks (1932). On the other hand, Ouspenskaya stayed in New York as a stage actress and acting teacher until 1936, when she went to Hollywood to become one of the industry’s busiest character actresses for more than a decade. With Ouspenskaya, accent was all, and she portrayed one central European (never a Russian) after another in everything from prestigious productions such as Dodsworth (1936) and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) to low-budget horror tales like The Wolf Man (1941) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Ultimately, however, Ouspenskaya’s greatest impact was as the teacher she had been prior to going to Hollywood; her students in New York included Lee Strasberg, a founder of the Group Theater and the Actors Studio.

One Russian who did play Russians on the screen was Anna Sten, an actress who has become a byword for Hollywood’s abuse of foreign performers. Brought to America in 1933 by producer Samuel Goldwyn, Sten, another veteran of the Moscow Art Theater and already a screen star in Germany, was kept idle 14 months so that studio publicists could put together a million-dollar promotion. They sought to whet the public’s appetite for the woman ballyhooed as “The Brightest Star in the Northern Skies.” Goldwyn worried so little about Sten’s (barely existing) English that he assigned her a German tutor whose own command of the language ran a distant second to her thick Prussian elocution. As producers told associates at the time, “If she looks good and can act, it doesn’t matter how she talks.”

Goldwyn was wrong. When Sten finally reached the screen in a 1934 adaptation of Emile Zola’s Nana, she was near enough to incomprehensible to be ridiculed from coast to coast as “Goldwyn’s Folly,” making it difficult for her ever to be taken seriously again. Later that year, with the critical japings only marginally milder, she apeared as Katusha in Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, retitled We Live Again. Sten made less than a dozen films over the rest of her career, including a couple (Exile Express in 1939 and Three Russian Girls in 1944) as a Russian émigré. Whenever she was asked about her Hollywood experience, she skirted hard criticism of Goldwyn, insisting that she regretted the Nana debacle only because it obscured what she deemed a solid performance in the adaptation of Resurrection. Numerous film historians in recent years have agreed with her.

Among male actors the most conspicuous of all Russians working in Hollywood was probably Akim Tamiroff. After skipping out on the Moscow Art Theater with Baclanova and Ouspenskaya during the 1923 U.S. tour, the Baku native embarked on a 50-year career of dramatic and comedic Slavic types both on stage and before the cameras. Tamiroff was nominated twice for Oscars – for The General Died at Dawn in 1936 and for For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943. An even more embarrassing loss to early-century Russian theater was that of Michael Chekhov, a nephew of Anton Chekhov and one of Stanislavsky’s closest associates. After teaching, directing, and even establishing a theater in England, Chekhov moved to the U.S. in the 1930s and set up another influential acting school. Between 1944 and his death in 1955, he appeared in 11 pictures; the most prominent was Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

Most of the other Russian émigrés to make their mark in America in the big studio era were journeymen directors (Anatole Litvak, Gregory Ratoff) or second-line actors (Mischa Auer, Ivan Desny, Ivan Triesault, Vladimir Sokoloff, Mikhail Rasumny). The latter were seldom given the opportunity to play more than agents of continental intrigue or hotel servers of continental breakfasts. Later, the defection of some of Russia’s leading dancers (Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov) produced somewhat more variety in roles, but still generally within a cloak-and-dagger context. Perhaps the émigré who ended up furthest from his roots – and from caricature of those roots on the screen – was Nazimova’s nephew Val Lewton, who wrote and/or produced such horror classics as Cat People, The Body Snatcher, and Isle of the Dead in the 1940s.

In addition to the genuine Russians who emigrated to America for work, Hollywood created a few of its own in an attempt to “continentalize” the allure of leading ladies after the success of Theda Bara’s vamp character. The most popular of these creations was Olga Petrova, touted by publicists as a Poland-born Russian noblewoman but, in fact, a modest British stage player who had entered the world as Muriel Harding. As Petrova, Harding starred in such silent vamp films as The Tigress (1914), The Vampire (1915), The Black Butterfly (1916), and Panther Woman (1918). Less magnetic on the screen but infamous in American movie history was Winifred Shaunessy. As Natasha Rambova, Shaunessy engendered indifference to When Love Grows Cold (1925). But as Rudolph Valentino’s wife, she has been blamed by generations of biographers for ruining the Latin Lover’s screen career and contributing to the physical and moral deterioration that ended with his death at the age of 31.

But in the end, continental vamps have proven to be only minor presences in the Hollywood gallery of Russian characters. With the exception of a few years during World War II, in fact, pride of place must go to those nasty creatures spawned by the Revolution, their noble (if sometimes flawed) aristocratic foes, and their even uglier KGB heirs. Making allowances for overlapping attitudes in specific features, it seems possible to distinguish six periods in Hollywood’s Russians:

• The 19-teens to the early 1920s, when first “progressive” aristocrats and then White Russian armies seemed like alternatives to the Bolsheviks. 

A typical film of the period was The Fall of the Romanovs (1917), in which all evil was laid at the doorstep of Rasputin. The tsar was depicted as a well-meaning dupe, the leader of an actual bloody pogrom was offered as a hero, and rebellious workers and peasants were portrayed as a rabble that made matters worse.

• The late 1920s, after it had become evident that the Bolsheviks were not going to go away. 

In films like Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) and Berthold Viertel’s The Spy (1931), there was unalloyed nostalgia for the Romanovs; in The Spy, an exiled aristocrat is even presented as a Christ-like figure awaiting the Second Coming.

• The 1930s, following Washington’s diplomatic recognition of Moscow and against the background of the growing threats posed by Mussolini and Hitler. 

While towering above other films of the genre as finely crafted entertainment, Ninotchka (1939) remained typical in this period’s more bemused, patronizing treatment of Soviet ideologues.

• World War II, when the Soviets were an ally against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. 

Although they were to be locked away or drastically re-edited within a few years, films like The Song of Russia (1943, from a story by the Russian Victor Trivas and directed by Gregory Ratoff) idealized the Russians as courageous partners in the Great Struggle.

• From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, when relations between the countries were dictated by McCarthyism or the Cold War. 

Starting with The Iron Curtain (1948), about the only acceptable Russian for Hollywood was coordinating subversive activities, fomenting strikes in American factories, or menacing the world with nuclear destruction.

• From 1970 to 1990, when first the cynical compromises of coexistence (and mutual enmity toward China) and then glasnost stressed the need for collusion between the superpowers. 

The representative Russian figure for Hollywood in this period was the spy who, while showing flashes of wiliness and even sadism, generally behaved like a friendly bear.

One curiosity of U.S. depictions of Russians even during openly hostile periods was the suggestion that, on some general cultural level, the peoples of the two countries had a great deal more in common with each other than either had with a third party. Unlike Hollywood’s treatment of Germans, where even films unrelated to World War II usually flirted with a glib equation of German=Nazi, only the most specious propaganda efforts ever equated Russians with those dreaded communists.The villain was the ideology, not the culture, so that when non-ideologues were presented with any dimension at all, it was usually either as victims or as self-assured veterans of distress, always ready to drink their American acquaintances under the table. Although these portraits also leaned heavily on stereotype, true venom was reserved for the ascetic, intellectual schemers who, as espionage agents, party hacks, or true believers, did not exist as human beings outside their nefarious tasks.

As might be expected, Soviet film views of the U.S. endured similar phases of paranoia, condescension, solidarity, and mutual cynicism. As far back as 1924, a pioneering film collective headed by Lev Kuleshov produced The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, a satire about a baffled American getting his first glimpse of Russia after the Revolution. Between the 1950s and 1980s, especially, the Soviets turned out a great number of theatrical features and TV series in which FBI and CIA agents engaged in the same murderously ambiguous pursuits that Hollywood ascribed to the KGB.

What remains to be seen now is whether greater access to the skills of Russia’s contemporary Pudovkins will enable the U.S. to depict a more complete people, without reliance on pornography, whether of a sexual or political kind.  RL

Donald Dewey is the author of 11 works of fiction and non-fiction, many on Hollywood and filmmaking, including, most recently, James Stewart, A Biography (1996).