You'll want to laugh at the proletariat message of these numbers, which come from such countries as Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria. But interviews with film historians and the movies' creators prove that they definitely weren't comedies. Besides, when you get right down to it, what's so funny about a government regimenting creative impulses? Watching a graceful person sing and dance about being forced to work a menial job from sun-up to sundown is so forcefully incongruent, it repeatedly flip-flops between hilarious and depressing.
You'd have to figure that not every film coming out of Russia was The Battleship Potemkin or Alexander Nevsky. But who knew about this?! Western Musicals, of course, aren't typically centered on staying on your toes while you work the assembly line, so the backs-to-the-grindstone urgency of these things make them look like grand-scale SCTV skits. It's hard to determine how you feel about them. You simply don't have a compartment in your head for this genre of film.
Sergei Eisenstein, the granddaddy of Russian Cinema, was partially responsible for these films catching on. After a less than fruitful 1931 trip to Hollywood, he and his assistant, Grigori Alexandrov, returned to Russia. Alexandrov was so taken with American musicals during their sojourn, he started making his own. His 1934 release, The Jolly Fellows, was actually banned by the government for being too positive (!), but its popularity was enough to convince Josef Stalin to order up more "constructive" song-and-dance pictures from Alexandrov. Stalin so enjoyed 1938's Volga Volga, he reportedly watched it over 100 times and even sent a print to Franklin Roosevelt. It must not have occurred to him that Roosevelt already had the real thing available.
Ranga, who was born in Romania, includes a slew remarkable clips, although, again, you have to decide for yourself exactly why they're remarkable. There's even an entry from the 1960s called Hot Summer that seems like an East German variation on a Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach picture. It's hard to imagine a more unrecognized movement in world cinema than this one. If you're the slightest bit intrigued, you should absolutely see East Side Story.
There aren't any extras on Kino's release, and the sound and picture quality of the clips isn't the greatest, as you can well imagine. Many of these films had never been seen outside of their home countries before Ranga got a hold of them. This is more of an historical artifact, and, in that respect, it meets all requirements.
For more information about East Side Story, visit Kino International. To order East Side Story, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Tatara
