Page 135 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

116 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
(Ilyinsky) needs to retrieve his winning lottery ticket from his landlady, whom he
was supposed to marry and with whom he has quarrelled. A poorly integrated
subplot, inserted to inject some ‘ideology’ into the farce, concerns the maltreatment
of Petya’s true love, Katya (Vera Maretskaya), who is being exploited by her cruel
relation, a minor Nepman who owns a shop.
Modest though it was, The Tailor from Torzhok obviously struck a responsive
chord with Soviet audiences, since it recorded a healthy profit only two months
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into its run. Critics like Khrisanf Khersonsky (an intelligent, generally moderate,
critic who enjoyed movies), on the other hand, found the picture only sporadically
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funny and the character of the tailor ‘alien’. Nevertheless, The Tailor escaped
any serious opprobrium until the Cultural Revolution: Protazanov was still reaping
the benefits of His Call.
His next comedy, The Three Millions Trial [1926], was a different matter. More
‘bourgeois’ in setting and style than just about any other film of Soviet production,
The Three Millions Trial is a sophisticated crime comedy-adventure that is
virtually indistinguishable from Western productions of the era. Among the movies
shown Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks when they visited Moscow in 1926,
The Three Millions Trial alone garnered no praise from the stars, the absence of
which was noted in the press. 52
Yet The Three Millions Trial does have a ‘class-conscious’ theme. It concerns a
banker who has sold his house for three million so that he will have the capital
necessary to speculate on food shortages. The famous ‘gentleman thief’ Cascarillia
(played by the debonair Anatoli Ktorov), with the assistance of the banker’s
lascivious wife Nora (Olga Zhizneva) steals the money, only to have his glory
stolen from him by the ‘common thief’ Tapioca (Igor Ilyinsky). Tapioca is arrested
trying to rob the banker’s house, and the police assume that he took the three
million. Since no one can imagine where the fortune is, Tapioca becomes a folk
hero for having outsmarted the police. Unable to stay out of the limelight,
Cascarillia dramatically appears at Tapioca’s trial and tosses the three million to
the wildly cheering crowd.
Despite the didactic potential of the theme, this stylish film was played for
entertainment value, so it is not surprising that 90 per cent of audiences surveyed
liked it. (Fairbanks and Pickford, expecting to see ‘revolutionary’ Soviet films,
naturally found it unremarkable.) The public embraced The Three Millions Trial
wholeheartedly and, like His Call and The Forty-First, the picture made a ‘top ten’
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list. Since Soviet audiences preferred European and especially American
movies, it was quickly recognised that The Trial’s popularity was largely due to its
resemblance to Western films (namely its genre, ‘Western-adventure’, and its
emphasis on sex and greed) –as well as to the phenomenal popularity of Ilyinsky
(who was reprising the role he had created for the Kommissarzhevsky Theatre’s
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adaptation of the same story). Even Sergei Eisenstein, who did not much
concern himself with Protazanov, singled out The Three Millions Trial as an
exemplar of the ‘Western-local’ film that was in his opinion anathema to a
revolutionary cinema. 55