Some of the film critics in the West, especially those with a more snobbish outlook, are prone to reducing Soviet cinema to the golden age of artistic experimentation in the 1920s and considering everything that came afterwards as nothing more than crude Communist propaganda. In reality, Soviet cinema was much more diverse, even when constrained by Stalinist dogma of Socialist Realism, providing not only varied content but also a form of popular entertainment that could, at times, give Hollywood a run for its money. One of the early examples can be found in Jolly Fellows a.k.a. Moscow Laughs a.k.a. Kostya the Shepherd, 1934 film by Grigori Aleksandrov, which is considered to be the first Soviet musical film.
The protagonist is Konstantin “Kostya” Ivanovich Potyohin (played by Leonid Utyosov), a shepherd who works at a farm near a seaside resort. While swimming at the beach, Elena (played by Marina Strelkova), a musically talentless daughter of an influential family, mistakes him for Gustav “Costa” Fraschini (played by Arnold Arnold), a famous Paraguayan conductor, and invites him to a party held by her mother (played by Elena Tapkina). Kostya, who is actually an accomplished musician, arrives with his herd of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and donkeys, which results in complete mayhem. During the event, Kostya falls in love with maidservant Anyuta (played by Lybov Orlova) and, when she leaves for Moscow, he decides to follow. In Moscow, he is again mistaken for Fraschini, leading to all kinds of complications, but ends as the leader of a jazz band that would, together with Anyuta, perform at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Grigori Aleksandrov is known as one of the closest associates of Sergei Eisenstein with whom he worked as screenwriter and director on his most important films, like Battleship Potemkin. In early 1930s, he followed Eisenstein during his tour of Hollywood, when the top Soviet film makers were preparing to transition to sound technology. The influence of Hollywood is not only very visible, but actually admitted by Aleksandrov in the opening titles that inform the audience that most popular Hollywood silent film comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton “won’t appear in the picture”. Aleksandrov plays with different styles and the film features a few animated sequences. The most impressive scenes appear in the beginning; the first is a long tracking shot featuring Utyosov singing a cheerful march and the second is another tracking shot showing people enjoying the beach. From that point on, Jolly Fellows gets less impressive, mostly because Aleksandrov at times seems to forget that he is shooting a sound film and humour is mostly of the slapstick variety, characteristic for the silent era. The film is also a little bit rough around the edges, mainly due to technical limitations and sound sometimes not being properly synchronised with the images.
Jolly Fellows is, despite everything, a reasonably entertaining film that features a couple of really funny scenes, like the chaotic dinner party or jazz band rehearsals that degenerate in comical brawls. Those looks more like they belong to the opus of the Marx Brothers or Jerry Lewis rather than something you might expect from cinema guided by Socialist Realism. Leonid Utyosov, a popular actor and singer (for whom Jolly Fellows would be, ironically, his last starring role on big screen, followed by numerous cameos in decades to come) handles his role very well. Same can be said for Lyubov Orlova, who played her role of singing maidservant well, and who later married Aleksandrov, becoming the top cinema star of Stalin’s USSR. The film proved immensely popular in the Soviet Union, which could partly be explained with all but complete absence of official ideology (the only hint can be found in two main protagonists being peasant and worker set against snobbish remnants of pre-revolutionary elite) and by providing clean escapist fun from realities of the country under increasingly suffocating political repression (which even claimed film’s co-writer Nikolai Erdman, arrested during production and forced to spend the next few years in internal exile). Although it never caused enthusiasm like Eisenstein’s works, Jolly Fellows had modest success even outside the Soviet Union and in the 1930s, many Communists and their sympathisers in foreign countries sang songs from the film in order to signal their allegiance to Soviets and Communism in general. Aleksandrov continued making similar films and in 1958 made a new version which, controversially, replaced Utyosov’s voice with Vladimir Troshin. In the same year, Jolly Fellows received a remake in the form of When She Stars, Look Out, a West German musical comedy directed by Geza von Cziffra. In 1978, faced with criticism, Aleksandrov had agreed to restore the original version.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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