Grigory Alexandrov: 1903-1983
In 1934, film director Grigory Alexandrov was 31 and in his prime when he created his greatest masterpiece, Jolly Fellows. Even at such a young age, Alexandrov already had many years of successful filmmaking behind him, despite a humble beginning as a costume assistant and stage hand in Yekaterinburg’s opera theater.
When he first caught the eye of the great director Sergei Eisenstein, while working as a young actor of the Proletkult First Workers Theater in Moscow, Alexandrov had not yet turned 20. Soon, however, he was playing the lead role in Eisenstein’s production of Ostrovsky’s, Too Clever by Half, and went on to appear in Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin before becoming the great director’s assistant.
Captivated by Eisenstein’s trailblazing ideas and the revolutionary changes taking place in the 1920s, Alexandrov embraced them all as part of the great changes taking place in the world of art. It was a time for the young, the spirited, and the strong. They would watch bold films with exciting action and rapidly changing images, featuring joyful men and women, embodiments of the new era.
Alexandrov’s next winning ticket was a three-year trip with Eisenstein through Western Europe, the United States, and Mexico. When Alexandrov, Eisenstein, and Eisenstein’s cinematographer, Eduard Tisse, set out in 1929, Eisenstein was already world famous. In Paris and Berlin they met with all the theatrical and cinematic elite. Alexandrov – the youngest and least prominent of the threesome – had the hardest lot. He had to deal with Eisenstein’s difficult personality, cater to his whims, run endless errands, and even pay the director’s debts. Nevertheless, this trip formed a high point in his life.
Just the memory of how he introduced the director Josef von Sternberg to a young dancer must have been something to savor for a lifetime. The dancer’s name was Marlene Dietrich, and her great career started with Sternberg’s Blue Angel. Rumor had it that the handsome Alexandrov was involved in a liaison with Dietrich. This was neither confirmed nor denied by Alexandrov, but it was later said that Lyubov Orlova, who had often been compared with the divine Marlene, cut the German star out of the photographs in her husband’s archives.
In America, Eisenstein and Alexandrov hobnobbed with Chaplin and Greta Garbo (again there were rumors of an affair) and got to know everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. They toured Hollywood film studios and then traveled through Mexico. In 1932, they returned home with a wealth of experience.
A completely different country awaited them. Over the past three years, the Soviet Union had been through collectivization and the first Five Year Plan, through the first show trials and famine in the Ukraine. How did Alexandrov – a child of the revolution – feel about all this? Doubt? Fear?
He began shooting the first film he would direct alone. He put together a team that included the brilliant screenplay writers Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass, the popular jazz singer Leonid Utyosov, the amazing musician Isaac Dunayevsky, and, finally, the actress who would become not only his wife, but also the Soviet Union’s top film star and the main attraction of his movies: Lyubov Orlova.
The film was Jolly Fellows, (Веселые ребята), the story of the shepherd Kostya, who believes that “song helps us live and love” and who longs to create his very own jazz band, and a maid named Anyuta, who is transformed into a popular music star. Here, most likely, lies the answer to the question of whether or not Alexandrov was consumed by fears and doubts. His film was so filled with vitality and fun, so joyous and life-affirming, that even if he was plagued by fears, his work left little room for them.
Many have speculated that the director appropriated filmmaking techniques from Disney, that Orlova’s film persona was based on Marlene Dietrich, and that Jolly Fellows was part of a plan by Boris Shumyatsky, head of the Soviet government agency responsible for cinema, to create a “Soviet Hollywood.”
However many ideas Alexandrov may have stolen from Hollywood and Broadway musicals, his films are infused with originality. The young Utyosov’s charm can be felt even today. The tapping of Orlova’s heels, as if she is about to break into tap-dancing as she sings “hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss, our iron can take care of this” (тюх, тюх, тюх, тюх, разгорелся наш утюг), and the funeral procession that suddenly explodes with joyous music – all that became a spray of champagne, a jubilant firework display for a country that was already creeping toward the years of the Great Terror. The screenwriter Nikolai Erdman was arrested and exiled during the filming of Jolly Fellows (his name had to be edited out of the credits). The film itself was attacked by critics and only saved by the fact that Stalin liked it.
Alexandrov set to work on his next comedy, Circus, of course with Orlova in the lead role. Now she played an American actress visiting the Soviet Union while hiding the fact that she has a black child. When her secret comes out, the audience joyously serenades the little boy, singing him lullabies in all the languages of the peoples of the USSR.
Circus came out in 1936, the year the purge of the army began, taking the lives of thousands of officers, and one year before the beginning of the party purge. Vladimir Nilsen, Alexandrov’s irreplaceable cinematographer, would be shot in 1938, the same year Alexandrov’s next film with Lyubov Orlova, Volga, Volga, was released. It was yet another Hollywood-style Cinderella story. This time Orlova played not a maid, but a postal worker in a provincial town who manages to make it as a singer, and even a composer. The screenplay was written by Nikolai Erdman, working from exile. Volga, Volga became Stalin’s favorite movie, a fact that was well known. In 1938, Boris Shumyatsky was also destroyed. The idea of a Russian Hollywood was laid to rest.
Alexandrov continued making movies, but he never again achieved the tremendous success he had with his first three films. In 1940, he turned Orlova into a peasant woman in the big city who becomes an outstanding shock worker in the film The Shining Path (Светлый путь). Of course, everyone went to see it, but the dazzling exuberance was no longer there.
In 1947, Alexandrov made his last splash with Spring (Весна), about a humorous misunderstanding revolving around two lookalikes – a stern scholarly woman and an elegant actress, both played, of course, by Orlova. Here, as always, was the enchanting music of Dunayevsky – his amazing song about spring, when “even a stump dreams about becoming a birch tree again.” Who could have guessed that eight years later this marvelous composer would end his own life? The great Faina Ranevskaya also had a role in this film, and some of her lines became instant catch phrases: “Beauty is a terrible force” and “I brought Dostoyevsky along so I wouldn’t be bored on the bus.”
But the end was near. Alexandrov lived another 36 years after the release of Spring. A brilliant, energetic artist, a recognized classic, a friend of Charlie Chaplin, a man of the world, after Spring he was not able to make anything worth seeing. Alexandrov tried to keep his finger on the ideological pulse of the Kremlin, and, when he sensed the time was right to denounce world imperialism, he produced the 1949 film, Meeting on the Elbe (Встречу на Эльбе). When a revival of the “Russian national idea” was called for (this was around the time when the great Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, who had represented his people in the multicultural serenade of the black child in Circus, was executed on Stalin’s orders), Alexandrov came up with Glinka (1952). These films were empty, formulaic shells, and they have been utterly forgotten.
After Stalin’s death, the director again attempted to make a musical comedy, but nothing came of it. In 1973, he made a movie about a young female spy, Starling and Lyra (Скворец и лира). The young woman was played by the no-longer-young Lyubov Orlova. Despite the best efforts of makeup artists, it was impossible to show her in closeup. The film was such a dud that it never made it to theaters.
Such were the final years of this couple, surrounded by the trappings of glory, but of no use to anyone – classics of world cinema and dinosaurs of the Soviet regime, people who had created brilliant comedies and loyally served a system that had little use for a sense of humor.
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