Page 133 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

114 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Crichton’ until the point of rescue. Maryutka, mindful of her duty as a Bolshevik,
claims her lover as her forty-first victim. Is this her victory as a Bolshevik or her
defeat as a person?
The Forty-First made the ‘top ten’ chart in 1928, listed as the third-most-popular
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film. But in 1927 (the year of the film’s release), critics were much more cautious
than they had been two years earlier when His Call appeared. Although The Forty-
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First was generally quite well received, there were some disquieting notes that
portended problems soon to come. ‘Arsen’, one of the most censorious of the new
breed of ‘hard-line’ critics, labelled it a ‘socially primitive’ and ‘decadent’ example of
the ‘Western adventure’ picture, all the more ‘dangerous’ because it was so well
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done. Fortunately for Protazanov, Arsen’s view of The Forty-First was in the
minority.
The final movie to be discussed among the triad of ‘good’ films, Don Diego and
Pelageya, is arguably the finest Soviet comedy of the 1920s. Based on a feuilleton
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by Bella Zorich called ‘The Letter of the Law’ which appeared in Pravda, Don
Diego and Pelageya is the story of an old woman’s unwitting attempts to
circumvent Soviet power, personified by ‘Don Diego’, a foolish daydreamer who is
the village station master. Don Diego (Anatoli Bykov) arrests Pelageya (Mariya
Blumenthal-Tamarina) for illegally crossing the railroad tracks, despite the fact
that she could not read the warning sign.
After a farcical trial, she is sentenced to three months in jail. Enter the Party;
two members of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) and the local Party
secretary come to the rescue of Pelageya and her bewildered husband.
Protazanov’s depiction of provincial life is scathing and very funny indeed,
revealing much about the problems of Soviet society: peasants are more than a
little mystified by the ideals and goals of the Revolution, and tsarist chinovniki have
been replaced by rigid, lazy and insolent Soviet apparatchiki. This movie, which
coincided with the campaign against the ‘bureaucratic deviation’, demonstrated
that it was possible to make a topical movie that could transcend the concerns of
the moment and entertain at the same time.
Don Diego and Pelageya enjoyed widespread praise as a fine example of what
the film comedy (a notoriously weak genre in Soviet cinema) could and should be.
But film critics, whatever their stripe, were nervous in 1928. Some felt compelled,
therefore, to assert that the role of the Party in solving problems had been
insufficiently developed, and that the great evil of bureaucratism had been too
individualised in the unlikely person of Don Diego. Despite these reservations (and
a fear that the film might be edited abroad in an unflattering fashion) Don Diego
and Pelageya was justly hailed, most concurring with A. Aravsky’s assessment that
the film was a ‘great event’ in the development of Soviet comedy. 49
The pictures that critics considered reasonably ‘good’ were well-made films,
popular with viewers, which demonstrated Protazanov’s increasing mastery over
the medium. Among his ‘bad’ pictures–that is, those that came under heavy
critical fire–The Tailor from Torzhok [1925] is the least interesting. Although it
features the popular comic actor Igor Ilyinsky, The Tailor is a slight comedy. Petya