Page 158 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 139
Red Devils [Krasnye d’yavolyata, 1923] and its four sequels. Although Ben-Salim
is used more as a prop than a performer in Nathan Becker, his incongruous
appearance in the Belorussian shtetl is a subject for mild vaudeville humour. ‘Is he
a Jew too?’ Tzale asks. ‘He is a bricklayer,’ Nathan replies. The town cantor
rushes over to Tzale’s hovel, shakes Jim’s hand and is suitably impressed: ‘This is
Nosn? Your Nosn from America? How did he get so blackened…like the earth?’
Unlike Jim, the figure of Nathan was not completely exotic. As did the early
1920s, the early 1930s saw a small reverse immigration from the USA back to the
Soviet Union. In his memoirs of the period, the journalist Eugene Lyons reports
that ‘the news that Russia had liquidated unemployment and was in dire need of
labour power brought hundreds of foreign job hunters to Moscow’. Most, however,
were disappointed. ‘Even where they had specific mechanical trades, only one in a
hundred managed to cut through the jungles of red-tape around Soviet jobs.’