Page 162 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 143
eponymous hero of Chapayev) adds that ‘the backs of the workers are as
important to us as the building of the wall’.
Unconvinced, Comrade Becker petulantly overturns the table on which the bricks
have been arranged in rows: ‘The piano they play? Why don’t you hire musicians
then? Meshugoim!’ The American considers his Soviet colleagues to be lunatics
and, unpacking his trowel, proposes an ‘American-style’ competition. ‘I will show
them who works better, Sovetishe klezmer or American bricklayer.’ When the
Yiddish version of Nathan Becker opened in New York in April 1933, the Daily
Worker would note that ‘28 years of intense economic struggle to live have left
their mark on Nathan Becker. He has become a machine, an automatic robot….
The new type of Soviet worker whom he now meets, a new man with a new
outlook on life, is incomprehensible to him.’ (The Worker, however, missed the
nuance. Nathan is not robotic enough. As Katerina Clark points out in her study of
socialist realist literature, the industrial utopia envisioned during the Five Year Plan
embraced such automation: ‘It was often claimed, especially in fiction, that human
psychology could be changed by putting people to work at machines: inexorably,
the machine’s regular, controlled, rational rhythms would impress themselves on
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the “anarchic” and “primitive” psyches of those who worked them.’ )
Despite its schematic narrative, Nathan Becker is a surprisingly playful film. As
the advertisement in New York’s Yiddish-language communist daily proclaimed
when the film opened in New York in April 1933: ‘Jewish worker, this is your
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holiday!’ Nathan Becker is at least as full of comic routines–one of them devoted
to the old men of the shtetl signing up for the ‘shock brigade’–as it is steeped in
Stalinist propaganda. There’s a definite strain of the native Jewish sense of humour,’
Variety observed. ‘A Soviet film that has definite laugh situations! That’s news in
itself.’ The reviewer added that ‘a lad named S.M.Mikhoels plays the part of a
stuttering old Jew with beautiful perfection’. 39
Indeed, the 42-year-old Mikhoels is delightful. As in Jewish Luck, Mikhoels
constructs his persona out of stylised bits of business. (In one comic throwaway, he
picks up a handy bust of Marx, stares at it, and reflectively strokes his own beard.)
His is an overwhelmingly tactile performance, as rigorous in its movements as a
ballet dancer’s. The fractured language he speaks is virtually his own–interspersed
with chuckling, clucking and the continual humming of a nign (a traditional prayer
chant). If glum David Gutman is a stolid proletarian type with a generic
resemblance to William Bendix, looking more like Mikhoels’s brother than his son,
Yelena Kashnitskaya is also something of a comedienne whose constant confusion
as to the date–she is always asking when it will be the sabbath–is a joke on the
Soviet ‘continuous-production week’ (four days of work followed by one day of
rest) instituted during the Five Year Plan.
Given the movie’s light mood, it seems appropriate that a circus ring should
provide the site for the bricklaying competition where, for a seven-hour shift,
Nathan will compete against a Soviet worker. (Shpis and Milman here
acknowledge their FEKS background although, according to Scott, the circus was
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Magnitogorsk’s most popular form of entertainment. ) Old Becker watches the