Page 136 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: YAKOV PROTAZANOV AND SOVIET CINEMA 117
Though The Tailor from Torzhok and The Three Millions Trial were criticised
fairly harshly, they had escaped lightly compared with The Man from the
Restaurant [1927] and The White Eagle [1928]. Both pictures represented
Protazanov’s return to melodramas on revolutionary themes but, unlike His Call
and The Forty-First, they lacked adventure and romance. Protazanov may
nevertheless have expected that he could repeat the success he had enjoyed with His
Call and The Forty-First.
The Man from the Restaurant takes place in 1916—17 and concerns the social
awakening of a poor waiter (played by the Moscow Art Theatre actor Mikhail
Chekhov). The waiter’s musically gifted daughter (Vera Malinovskaya) must for
financial reasons leave school to play the violin in the restaurant. There she
attracts the unwelcome attention of a wealthy industrialist who hopes to make her
his mistress. The contrasts between the haute bourgeoisie (greedy, profligate,
immoral and cruel) and the proletariat (as depicted by the waiter and his daughter–
hard-working, humble, and honest) are sharply drawn. Protazanov’s efforts to
evoke the waiter’s growing sense of outrage were apparently sincere, but the film
suffers from a number of shortcomings.
The plot and mise-en-scène are laboured and strongly reminiscent of F.W.
Murnau’s The Last Laugh [Der letzte Mann, 1924] which leads to an inevitable and
unfortunate comparison. At a time when there was an ever-increasing clamour for
a positive Soviet hero, the protagonist of The Man from the Restaurant is far from
positive. The waiter is so tediously humble that the picture lacks dramatic focus, a
problem intensified by Chekhov’s mannered and theatrical performance.
Moreover, the waiter’s ‘political’ transformation seems to spring from purely
personal sources: his desire to protect the virtue of his beloved daughter (and his
grief over the death of his son at the front). It certainly did not help The Man from
the Restaurant’s reception, considering the political climate in 1927, that the plot
had been derived from a pre-Revolutionary story by Ivan Shmeliev. (Like
Protazanov, Shmeliev was a member of the Moscow kupechestvo who had
emigrated to the West; unlike Protazanov, he had not returned.)
In 1927, on the eve of the March 1928 Party Conference on Cinema Affairs
which heralded the start of the Cultural Revolution in cinema, the two major studios
–Sovkino and Mezhrabpom-Rus–found themselves under heavy fire. The Man
from the Restaurant, along with The Tailor from Torzhok and The Three Millions
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Trial, became ammunition in the assault on Mezhrabpom. The Man was
specifically attacked, over and over, as too theatrical and ‘reactionary’. 57
When The White Eagle was released, the Cultural Revolution was definitely
under way. While the film is flawed, it illustrates that Protazanov was not–as his
critics often charged–a ‘formula’ film-maker; certainly he was not the ‘epigone of
Khanzhonkovshchina’ that Sergei Tretyakov (an opponent on the artistic left)
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claimed. The White Eagle is an adaptation of Leonid Andreyev’s story about a
provincial governor during the Revolution of 1905. The governor (V.Kachalov)
orders troops to break up a street demonstration by firing on a crowd and three
children are among those killed in the ensuing mêlée. Rewarded for his success at