Stalin's Comedian

January 10 is the centennial of the founder of the Soviet musical comedy, Grigory Alexandrov (his real surname was Mormonenko).

Alexandrov’s career started behind the theater curtains. He worked as costume assistant, stage designer and technician in the Yekaterinburg opera. After completing a course in directing, in 1921 he joined Proletkult’s First Workers’ Theater, where he met Sergei Eisenstein (see sidebar at left), whose famous Battleship Potemkin (1925) he co-directed. He also scripted and co-directed Eisenstein’s October (1927) and The Old and the New (1929), later accompanying him to the United States and Mexico to work on the never completed Que Viva Mexico!

In the 1930’s, Alexandrov was charged with the task of creating the Soviet musical comedy. He made his debut with Vesyoliye Rebyata (Happy Fellows), also known outside Russia as Moscow Laughs or Jazz Comedy. The film was a huge hit and made Alexandrov’s wife, Lyubov Orlova, the star and sex symbol of “Soviet Hollywood.”

Alexandrov was author of the silver screen myth that nowhere are people happier or freer than in the Soviet Union. It was a tribute to his talent as a director and his able selection of actors that the myth propagated as reality and crowds lined up to see his films.

His second film, Circus (1936), won Alexandrov even greater popularity. Circus tells the story of a white American woman, Marion Dixon (hinting at Alexandrov’s favorite actress, Marlene Dietrich), played by Orlova, who is brought to the Soviet Union by a German circus actor. The German manipulates Dixon by threatening to disclose her secret—that she has a black baby. When Dixon’s secret is finally made known, she realizes she has been worrying for nothing, that there is no racial discrimination in the country of Soviets.

In a famous scene, Dixon’s black baby is passed from one set of loving hands to another, rocked to sleep by a lullaby sung in the languages of the different nations of the Soviet Union, with famous Jewish theater director Salomon Mikhoels, murdered a decade later, in 1948, on Stalin’s orders, singing in Yiddish.

The main song of the film, “Vast is my Homeland,” with music by Dunaevsky and the words by Lebedev-Kumach) could well be called the Soviet Union’s unofficial national anthem. “Nobody in the world can laugh and love better than us,” the characters sang. Indeed, one year later, in 1937, the darkest year of Stalin’s purges, the film, which showed how “freely man breathed” in the Soviet Union, received the Grand Pris at the International Exhibition in Paris.

The script for Circus was written by famous Soviet writers Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov and Valentin Kataev, who all later refused to put their names on the script, outraged by Alexandrov’s interpretation of their original work.

In 1938, Alexandrov served up another hit musical comedy, Volga-Volga. The movie tells of a group of amateur musicians who travel the Volga river to Moscow to take part in a musical contest. Their antics and singing throughout the film underscored the ideological message that ordinary working people possessed inumerable talents.

Alexandrov’s best-known post-war film was Spring, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival. Spring is about cinema and life inside a film studio. A professor studying solar energy and an opera actress who dreams of starring in a film, both played by Orlova, find themselves forced by the circumstances to “trade roles.” Later, in 1983, Alexandrov made a documentary about Lyubov Orlova.

Grigory Alexandrov died in Moscow in December 1983, at the age of eighty.