Page 164 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 145
Batalov, star of The Path to Life) makes his way to New York to discover his uncle
Isaac and cousin Rose being evicted from their apartment. Gorizont and Rose care
for the elderly Isaac; however, after the girl runs off, Isaac commits suicide and
Gorizont enlists in the American army. His unit is despatched to Russia to aid the
Whites but, deserting once more, Gorizont joins the Bolshevik cause. The film
ends, some fifteen years later, with Gorizont a distinguished locomotive engineer
contrasted to a former bourgeois who cannot reconcile himself to the Soviet
regime.
The Age of Majority [Sovershennoletie, 1935], directed by Boris Schreiber for
Belgoskino from Johann Seltzer’s scenario, is based on a reverse transformation:
the Bolshevik hero goes underground as a Jewish factory foreman. In Vladimir
Korsh-Sablin’s The First Platoon [Pervyi vzvod, 1933], another Belgoskino
production, David Gutman plays an aged but virtuous Jewish worker. A pair of
stereotypical ‘little’ Jews appear in Ivan Kavaleridze’s By Water and Smoke
[Koliivshchina, 1933], made for Ukrainfilm and released in the USA as Mass
Struggle, along with Moshko, ‘a young Jewish worker in revolt against the ancient
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submissiveness of his race’. The saga of an eighteenth-century peasant uprising
against the Polish aristocracy, the film featured dialogue in Ukrainian, Polish and
Yiddish, as well as Russian. (To judge from surviving publicity photos, Kavaleridze’s
1935 Prometheus [Prometei, 1935] also features traditional Jewish characters.)
In 1933, Ukrainfilm unceremoniously cancelled Vladimir Vilner’s partially shot
Shtetl Ladeniu [Mestechka Ladeniu], adapted from a comedy by the Ukrainian-
Jewish writer Leonid Pervomaisky that had been produced by Berezil the previous
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year. Still, one last Soviet shtetl film was released in June 1935, two months
before the formal proclamation of the Popular Front.
Lenfilm’s The Border [Granitsa], was one of several Soviet films made during
the transitional 1933—5 period that portray the hostile regimes (but fraternal
workers) surrounding the Soviet Union. Thus, the pre-Revolutionary shtetl is
located in contemporary Poland–only a few miles from the Lenin kolkhoz and the
Belorussian SSR, but clearly another world. Here, in old Dudino, the worst of the
old ways prevail. The oppressed Jews have made a religion of their despair. A rich
factory owner dominates the town’s economic life. (Thoroughly cynical and yet not
altogether inhuman, this class enemy not only uses the local rabbi as his front, but
betrays the innocent young woman who asks his help, ‘Jew to Jew, Zionist to
Zionist’.) Meanwhile the superstitious villagers try to improve conditions by staging
a ‘Black Crown’, marrying the shtetl’s oldest spinster to an eligible widower in the
cemetery at midnight. The prospective bridegroom, a poor shoemaker, agrees only
because the authorities have duplicitously agreed to release his imprisoned son and
daughter, a communist organiser and a Zionist firebrand respectively. When the
wedding is disrupted by Polish soldiers, the bridegroom kills one and has to be
smuggled across the Soviet border.
This promised land is never seen, only described: ‘We saw camp-fires and
people singing around them. The songs were definitely Jewish,’ says the returned
smuggler, a young clerk played by Venyamin Zuskin. ‘There, it is possible to live.’