Word: alexandrov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some Commusicals did fit the stolid stereotype--Mikhail and Judit shouting, "Let's harvest the beet crop right here!"--but many have an enduring buoyancy. Grigori Alexandrov's pioneering The Jolly Fellows (1934) percolates with jaunty jazz, Cubist compositions and a Dietrichish blond in a party hat. The amazing Midnight Revue (G.D.R., 1962) is a comically cynical parable about the difficulty of making a musical when your producer is not Arthur Freed but a pack of philistine bureaucrats. We can't approve your film, the apparatchiks sing...
Like Hitler, who insisted on a steady stream of musicals from the German studios, Stalin was a big fan of the genre; he saw Alexandrov's Volga, Volga (1938) 100 times. And busy as he was in 1933, supervising the forced starvation of 7 million Ukrainians, Stalin took time out to see The Jolly Fellows. It was his enthusiasm that overruled the censors' original...
...only Soviet specialists in musicals were Alexandrov and Ivan Pyriev, the man who made the tractor movies. Pyriev's peasants in Tractor Drivers (1939) sing, "With shellfire thundering and gleaming steel,/ The machines will race ahead to lead the march." In Alexandrov's factory fantasy The Bright Path (1940), workers sing, "Whether you work a machine or break through rocks/ A wonderful dream reveals itself and calls you forward." Naive, yes, but ferociously pertinent for the Russian audience--propaganda in its noblest form...