Page 132 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: YAKOV PROTAZANOV AND SOVIET CINEMA 113
discussed below, The Feast of St Jorgen and Ranks and People did not attract the
unwelcome attention they might have earlier.) Whether knowingly or not,
Protazanov alternated between making films which his critics found acceptable and
those which they found unacceptable. Though the critical reception of his films
might be unpredictable, their public reception was quite predictable, and
Mezhrabpom was much more concerned with box-office success than with
‘critical’ acclaim.
His Call [1925], The Forty-First [1927] and Don Diego and Pelageya [1928]
baffled Protazanov’s opponents and help explain his survival during the Cultural
Revolution. How could the director of Aelita have made ‘truly Soviet’ films such as
these? His Call appealed immediately to Soviet audiences and appeared on a ‘top
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ten’ list in 1925. In His Call, Protazanov succeeded where other Soviet directors
had not–he had made an entertaining but indubitably ‘correct’ film about Soviet
life.
The melodrama begins in the final days of the Revolution; a rich industrialist
and his son Vladimir (Anatoli Ktorov, who was to become a favourite of
Protazanov’s) hide some of their fortune before fleeing abroad. Although
Protazanov dwells with obvious pleasure on the scenes of their lavish life in Paris,
he took care to contrast this ‘decadence’ with the suffering that Soviet citizens,
especially children, were simultaneously undergoing. Several years after the
Revolution, the pair has spent all their money, and so Vladimir returns to Soviet
Russia to retrieve the cache, enlisting a kulak as his accomplice. Young Katya
(Vera Popova, from the Vakhtangov Theatre) and her grandmother (Mariya
Blumenthal-Tamarina, a famous stage actress) now occupy the room where the
treasure was stashed. Katya, attractive but very naive, is easily seduced by the
depraved Vladimir. Quick to resort to violence despite his successful seduction,
Vladimir murders Katya’s grandmother in his desperate efforts to retrieve the
gold. He ends up, fittingly, with a bullet in the back. In the meantime, Lenin has
died, and the Party has issued its ‘call’ for new members, dubbed the ‘Leninist
enrolment’. The ‘fallen woman’ Katya hears the call but, unworthy to join the Party’s
ranks, resists it. Eventually she is convinced that joining the Party will redeem her
sins. His Call had everything social critics wanted–contemporary subject-matter
and precise details of everyday life, and everything the public wanted –love,
violence and a happy ending. The usually dour reviewers could find little about
which to complain. 44
Protazanov repeated this formula for success (Soviet subject+melodrama+love
interest) in The Forty-First. He transformed Boris Lavrenev’s somewhat wooden
novella into a memorable picture that, like His Call, was quite entertaining. The plot
of The Forty-First is high melodrama: a Red Army sharpshooter, Maryutka
(played by the engaging Ada Voitsik, then a student at GTK, the state film
institute) and the White officer who is her prisoner (Ivan Koval-Samborsky from
the Meyerhold Theatre) are stranded on a desert island after a storm. Once on the
island, separated from the rest of her Red Army company, Maryutka falls in love
with the young aristocrat, and the story becomes a kind of reverse ‘Admirable