THE BLUE ANGEL and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Aleksandrov's CIRCUS

The Blue Angel and Blackface:Redeeming Entertainment inAleksandrov’s CircusBETH HOLMGREN

The critical recovery of Stalinist popular culture has been complicated, perhaps to agreater extent than popular culture in other national contexts, by moral condemnation ofthe producer’s political complicity and abiding social revulsion for the very concept oflight entertainment. Perhaps the hardest cases for critical expiation are the “feel good”products of the high Stalinist era—such fare as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s famous quartet ofmusical comedy films: Veselye rebiata (The Happy Guys; 1934), Tsirk (Circus; 1936),Volga-Volga (1938), and Svetlyi put' (The Radiant Path; 1940). Like the kolkhoz musicalsof Ivan Pyr'ev, Aleksandrov’s one-time coworker, these films, dubbed “musical comedies”to mask their kinship to the bourgeois genre of “musical,” were judged to exemplify the“varnishing of reality” that Khrushchev damned in his 1956 secret de-Stalinization speech.1

Indeed, the film scholar Maia Turovskaia asserts that while Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volgadid “not arouse as much passionate controversy as [Pyr'ev’s] Cossacks of the Kuban,” it“may qualify as the second most distorted work in Soviet cinema ... because [it] was madebetween 1936 and 1938.”2

Over the last fifteen years, scholarship on Stalin-era film has become more textuallyand contextually nuanced, moving toward a comprehensive history of “how the Sovietgenre film was made” through the creative interactions and political negotiations ofdirectors, scriptwriters, actors, composers, designers, and producer-bureaucrats.3 We caneven claim a mini-boom in the critical rehabilitation of the Soviet musical, purveyed

My great thanks to Josephine Woll, Madeline G. Levine, and an anonymous reader, all of whom helped me betterfocus and articulate the argument in this essay. The mistakes are all mine.

1Richard Taylor, “‘But eastward, look, the land is brighter’: Towards a topography of utopia in the Stalinistmusical,” in 100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology? ed. Diana Holmes and Alison Smith(Manchester, 2000), 13 (repinted in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. E. A.Dobrenko and Eric Naiman [Seattle, 2003], 201–18)..

2Maia Turovskaia, “The Strange Case of the Making of Volga Volga,” in Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughterwith a Lash, ed. Andrew Horton (Cambridge, England, 1993), 75–76.

3Richard Taylor, “Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s,” inInside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie(New York, 1991), 193.

The Russian Review 66 (January 2007): 5–22Copyright 2007 The Russian Review

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popularly through Dana Ranga’s 1997 documentary East Side Story which samples EastGerman, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, and Soviet musicals in search of “music, fun andcolors in a world of ambiguity and suspicion,” and developed analytically by such scholarsas Richard Stites, Richard Taylor, Oksana Bulgakowa, Katerina Clark, and ThomasLahusen.4 Stites outlines players, topics, and features in his survey history of Russianpopular culture from 1900.5 Taylor investigates studio operation and style, examiningthe 1930s legacy of Boris Shumiatskii, head of the State Directorate of the Cinema andPhotographic Industry, and defining a “topography of utopia in the Stalinist musical.”6

Oksana Bulgakowa catalogues and quantifies the female beauties of Stalinist film, atypology that inevitably spotlights Liubov’ Orlova and Marina Ladynina, the reigningqueens of Stalinist musicals directed by their respective husbands, Aleksandrov and Pyr'ev.7

Both Lahusen and Clark present useful close analyses of Aleksandrov’s The Happy Guysand Volga-Volga, detailing the films’ production history and establishing their doubleframes of reference to Stalinist culture and Western genre movies.8

Yet Clark’s and Lahusen’s single film studies also indicate the still problematicstatus of entertainment in the critical assessment of Aleksandrov. Clark remarks theexception of Aleksandrov’s “lightness” and “comedy” to the rule of heavily ideologizedStalinist films, implying an intriguing parallel between his musicals and the very polishedgenre films that dominated the Nazi German film industry.9 Lahusen readily acknowledgesthe Hollywood genre film features that Aleksandrov imported for the making of HappyGuys, but he resists demoting Soviet musicals of the 1930s to what he identifies as slickHollywood product, as his subtitle foretells: “How the Stalinist Film Musical Caught Upwith Hollywood and Overtook It.” Lahusen argues that Aleksandrov’s work, unlikeHollywood musicals, “transcend[s] both propaganda and ‘pure entertainment’” and“communicate[s] a genuine type of emotion and intimacy.”10

4East Side Story, Dana Ranga, dir., 1997. Produced by Anda Film, Canal+, DocStar, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk.5Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, England, 1992).6Richard Taylor, “‘But eastward, look,’” 11–26; and idem, “Ideology as Mass Entertainment,” 193–216.7Oksana Bulgakova, “Sovetskie krasavitsy v Stalinskom kino,” in Sovetskoe bogatstvo: Stat'i o kul'ture,

literature, i kino, ed. Marina Balina at al. (St. Petersburg, 2002), 391–411.8Katerina Clark “Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political

Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London, 2002), 215–34 (Russian version in Sovetskoe bogatstvo [2002]: 371–90);Thomas Lahusen, “From Laughter ‘Out of Sync’ to Post-Synchronized Comedy, or, How the Stalinist Film MusicalCaught Up with Hollywood and Overtook It,” in Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment,ed. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker (Westport, CT, 2002), 31–42 (Russian version in Sovetskoe bogatstvo[2002]: 342–57). In contrast, Moira Ratchford’s fine study of Circus focuses mainly on its Stalinist frame ofreference, arguing how Aleksandrov loaded the film with contemporary ideological content—its “musical declaration”of the new Soviet constitution, glorification of Soviet egalitarianism, and unmasking of fascism. See Ratchford,“Circus of 1936: Ideology and Entertainment under the Big Top,” in Inside Soviet Film Satire (1993): 83–93.

9It is worth noting that nonreductive scholarship on Nazi popular film is a relatively recent phenomenon. SeeLutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley, 2002): “The DarkMirror wants to contribute to film studies’ reconsideration of the national and the popular. It builds on recent workin German film scholarship that has emphasized the extent to which German cinema has been from its very inceptionas cinema of cultural transfers and transcultural fusions, of border crossings and transgressive identifications. Unlikea great deal of postwar scholarship, which simply disparaged European genre cinema as bad objects, The DarkMirror is intended to develop a nuanced vocabulary able to assess the narrative energies and stylistic shapes ofGerman popular filmmaking” (p. 2).

10Lahusen, “From Laughter,” 41.

The Blue Angel and Blackface 7

Clearly, there linger certain questions about the genesis and originality ofAleksandrov’s work. Why would this filmmaker venture such uniquely “entertaining”fare in the Stalinist 1930s? How did he negotiate official disapproval of Western influenceand domestic prejudice against popular culture—in the critical establishment if not themovie-going public? Whether or not we agree with Lahusen about the efficacy of suchconcepts as “pure entertainment” and “genuine emotion,” did Aleksandrov effectivelydistinguish his popular films from their successful Western prototypes? How did he pulloff, politically and artistically, a sequence of Stalin-era musical hits?

As film historians have elaborated, a curious combination of socioeconomic factors,professional experience, and a dictator’s movie-going tastes launched Aleksandrov’sventure into musical comedy. In this article I argue that Aleksandrov successfully defendedand sustained his venture onscreen as well. His 1936 Circus, the second musical in thequartet, thematically spotlights the import and adaptation of Western entertainment forSoviet performance and Soviet consumption. Circus extends the practice that HappyGuys commenced, integrating many genre features (plot paradigms, featured stars, song-and-dance numbers, shot strategies) reiterated in Hollywood musicals of its day. Yet incontrast to his first musical, Circus not only showcases “the political ideas and culticmotifs of the Stalin state” (what Stites itemizes as “antifascism, ethnic equality, thedemocratic constitution, the cult of aviation, the new Moscow construction”) but alsocorrects the Western show business it imports.11 Specifically, Circus critiques the economicexploitation and social injustice of Western entertainment and undoes its falsely glamorizedor otherwise distorted representations of sexuality and race. One of the key missions ofAleksandrov’s Circus is to recover, cherish, and naturalize the “authentic” suffering humanbeings that Western film, and particularly Hollywood films, marginalize and mask. Itsonscreen acts of redemption and sovietization justified its own entertainment focus,I contend, and thereafter smoothed the way for the making of the screwball Volga-Volgaand the fairy tale Radiant Path.

My analysis of Circus as the pivot in Aleksandrov’s popular filmmaking, the moviethat in a sense proved his moral and national license to entertain, begins by reviewing thedirector’s close encounters with Western film. Grigorii Aleksandrov (1903–84) first gainedrenown as one of Sergei Eisenstein’s “iron five” (zheleznaia piaterka) assistants, in whichcapacity he developed as a jack of all film trades, from acting to scriptwriting to directing.But his professional education expanded most significantly through an extended Westerntour with Eisenstein, a trip undertaken when Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Joseph Schenck(then president of United Artists and Eisenstein’s relative) traveled to Moscow and promisedthem an invitation to Hollywood. Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and cameraman Eduard Tisseheaded West in 1929 in hot pursuit of sound film technology.12 Along the way theystopped in Berlin and became acquainted with the American director Joseph von Sternberg,who had been recruited to film The Blue Angel, starring Emil Jannings and an unknownMarlene Dietrich, for the German studio UFA. The Soviet visitors eagerly helped the

11Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 89.12Grigorii Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino (Moscow, 1976), 115.

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American guest director with the new intricacies of film recording.13 In his memoirsAleksandrov recalls the unexpected pleasure of palling around with Jannings, “a devilishlytalented individual.” He makes no mention of meeting Dietrich, whose screen personawas then being molded by von Sternberg, until the trio reaches Hollywood, where therising German/American star dared to befriend the visiting Soviets.14

Aleksandrov’s extended stay in Hollywood produced far more mixed impressions.On the one hand, he waxes wry in his memoirs about Hollywood’s showy welcome andoppressive luxury. He deplores the film industry’s subordination of creativity to the market,the corrosive obsession of the businessmen studio heads with moneymaking and advertisinggoods, and the predictable ascendancy of boastful, capricious directors and impossiblestars. “In Hollywood,” Aleksandrov observes, “they don’t think about making a trulyartistic picture,” and the Russians in consequence make no movies with their sponsoringstudio, Paramount.15 Alexandrov recalls the dictatorial ultimatum of studio head JesseLasky: “Either you make pictures Paramount is interested in, or we go our separate ways.”16

On the other hand, Hollywood’s vast resources and extraordinarily advanced technicalbase awed Aleksandrov, who was mesmerized by the man in the sound booth, and by theinnovative animated musicals of Walt Disney, in which the music track determined shotsand plot.17 Although he identified Mickey Mouse as his favorite hero, he also conceiveda lasting admiration for the work and person of Charlie Chaplin, who not only escortedthe Russians around town and country but also impressed them with his artistry,perfectionism, independence, and respect for his audience. In Aleksandrov’s estimation,Chaplin created profound art out of stunts that would be tasteless if performed by lessertalents.18

When Aleksandrov came home in 1932, he was not penalized for this Westernexperience, but mobilized to apply it by the highest authority. Upon his return Stalinqueried him about his trip and complained about art lagging behind the Five-Year Plan,declaring, as Aleksandrov carefully remembers, that “the people love a cheerful, joyousart, an art of gaiety and comedy.”19 Since the late 1920s, criticism of the “aestheticismand formalism” of intelligentsia directors such as Eisenstein had been mounting and thefilm industry was being hard-pressed to produce mass-pleasing films that would attractmore movie-goers and greater revenue. The shortage of foreign currency and the emphasison production in the Five-Year Plan exacerbated the need for domestic popular films.20

Shumiatsky vigorously lobbied for film “genres that are infused with optimism, with the

13Ibid., 118–19.14Ibid., 130. In Fun in a Chinese Laundry: An Autobiography (New York, 1965), Jozef von Sternberg remarks

that George Grosz implied that Dietrich was his Trilby, but that Dietrich herself “preferred to be known as the LizaDoolittle to my Professor Higgins rather than the Trilby to my Svengali or the Galatea to my Pygmalion” (pp. 223–24). See also S. S. Prawer, The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) (London, 2002), 14, 19, 59, 67–68.

15Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 123.16Ibid., 137–38.17Ibid., 126, 130–31.18Ibid., 131–34, 210.19Ibid., 159.20Taylor, “Ideology as Mass Entertainment,” 195–98.

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mobilizing emotions, with cheerfulness, joie-de-vivre and laughter”; in his book Moviesfor Millions he assigned comedy the vital task of “creating a good, joyous spectacle” for“the victorious class.”21

Thus, the recurring challenge confronting Aleksandrov was how to make an effectiveand original Soviet musical comedy—a movie with joyous spectacle, a good-quality soundtrack, local relevance, and popular appeal. His first effort, perhaps predictably, involvedrampant experimentation with imports. Early on Aleksandrov recognized what scholarsof the American musical have traced—that a film musical derives from, combines, andthen supplants other popular music forms such as vaudeville, the music hall play, and therevue.22 At Shumiatsky’s suggestion and with the help of composer Isaac Dunaevskii andthe playwrights Vladimir Mass and Nikolai Erdman, Aleksandrov transformed a musichall revue titled Muzykal'nyi magazin (The Music Shop) into a first screenplay for TheHappy Guys. Lahusen nicely details this film’s “dialogue with American cinema”—itsopening cartoon credits of great Hollywood comedians (including Chaplin) andkaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of Busby Berkeley choreography, its transformativeopening number in which the shepherd Kostia (played by band leader Leonid Utesov)randomly samples objects in the passing landscape to make music, and its counterpoint ofsound and music in lieu of Hollywood’s relatively new system of synchronizing the imagetrack with a prerecorded sound track.23

Aleksandrov’s first musical comedy demonstrated his skill and innovation as a popularfilmmaker, yet was condemned in the press as unabashedly Western entertainment. Sovietcritics decried its wholesale transfer of American features, from its apolitical message toits bourgeois jazz.24 Although Stalin himself had enjoyed the film and Aleksandrov likelywon the Order of the Red Army in January 1935 in consequence, the director admittedthat his critics’ objections to the film’s plotlessness and lack of social content “were notgroundless.”25 Yet the subject of his next musical comedy was also drawn from andfirmly ensconced in the world of popular entertainment. Browsing the music hall oncemore for material in 1935, Aleksandrov became interested in Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov’splay Pod kupolom tsirka (Under the Big Top) and engaged the famed comic novel-writingduo, along with Petrov’s brother-in-law, Valentin Kataev, to develop it into a screenplay.Soon after its completion, Il'f and Petrov embarked for the United States, where they wereto crank out their propagandistic travelogue, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (One-Story America).When they discovered the changes that Aleksandrov, with the assistance of Isaac Babel',had wrought without their permission, they demanded that their names be removed fromthe film’s credits. Il'f and Petrov never stated their objections; the editor of their 1996Sobranie sochinenii surmises that the two felt Aleksandrov had violated the style of theirsatirical comedy.26

21Ibid., 208–9.22Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 189; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio

System (Philadelphia, 1981), 186; Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2d ed. (London, 1993), 94.23Lahusen, “From Laughter,” 35–37. Examining its themes, plot, numbers, and technical production, Lahusen

argues that The Happy Guys “can be considered as a manifesto of ‘how to make a musical’ in Soviet conditions.”24Ivan Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov (Moscow, 1976), 22–23, 32, 39.25Ibid., 32–33; Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 189.26Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, Pod kupolom tsirka, in their Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1996), 3:491.

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Notwithstanding Il'f and Petrov’s rejection of Aleksandrov’s finished product, theirscreenplay furnishes the basic structure of the film’s well-made plot. Set in a Sovietcircus, Under the Big Top highlights an imported American attraction billed “Flight tothe Moon,” managed by the disingenuous German impresario Franz von Kneishits, andfeaturing the girl singer, Alina, who is shot out of a cannon through a paper moon. Whenthe cost-conscious circus director enlists one of his leading performers, Martynov, tocreate a cheaper yet superior Soviet variant (“Flight to the Stratosphere”), Martynov soonfalls for Alina, treats her to Russian-language lessons, and discovers her abuse by vonKneishits. The jealous German in turn threatens to tell Alina’s dread secret to her newSoviet friends—that she was married to a black man and has a mulatto son. The plotcrescendoes to two crises, a resolution, and a spectacular finale. Martynov’s “Flight”fails almost tragically; Alina clings to her injured Russian lover; von Kneishits consequentlyreveals her secret and her son in the arena; the circus-goers accept the white mother andmixed-race child; and Alina and Martynov together successfully and spectacularly fly tothe stratosphere.

It bears noting that Il'f and Petrov’s screenplay parallels standard American musicalsin several important ways—first and foremost, in its positive, self-justifying focus onentertainment and entertainers.27 Under the Big Top soberly notes the international evilsof rising fascism and American racism, but mainly dwells on the antics and foibles ofdaily circus operations, exploring a benign world where only the choleric circus directorstruggles with Soviet bureaucracy, rejecting a talking dog act on account of its“unmobilizing,” “petty bourgeois” repertoire, fuming at the three writers from the StateUnion of Musicians, Stage, and Circus Workers who overcharge him, and agonizing overthe critical comments submitted by the circus’s anonymous “organized viewer.”28

Focused on the various aspects of putting on a show, Under the Big Top overlaps toa striking extent with the Hollywood backstage musical which, as film scholar Jane Feuernotes, “brings together life offstage and onstage” and places “the success of the couple ...in a metaphorical relationship to the success of the show.”29 Its plot concentrates on whatRichard Altman identifies as the musical’s crucial romantic pairing of “parallel stars, ofopposite sex, and radically divergent values,” whose “opposite life styles and values” areeventually merged.30 As in numerous American musicals, the primary couple of Alinaand Martynov are doubled by a secondary couple exploited for comic relief. Il'f andPetrov cast Raechka as the director’s daughter, a bareback rider who loves to eat, andSkameikin as a skirt-chasing circus-goer.31

In transforming this screenplay, Alexandrov retained its main plotlines and actuallyamplified its depiction of circus acts and backstage business, shot the film according toan already recorded music track (in contrast to Happy Guys and according to standardHollywood practice), obviously politicized several of its characters, trimmed its mild

27Richard Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, 1987), 49.28Il'f and Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii 3:439, 454–55, 460.29Feuer, Hollywood Musical, 80.30Altman, American Film Musical, 50.31Ibid., 19, 31–32.

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domestic satire, and altered the film’s tonality and “star” focus.32 The circus director,broadly played by the character actor Vladimir Volodin, remains choleric and comicallyreactive, but has softened into a kindly father figure, the head of the circus’s malaiasem'ia or little family, as Josephine Woll observes.33 The strapping young actor SergeiStoliarov, whom Stites describes as a “Kirov look-alike,” is cast as Martynov, the romanticlead, and he enters the film as a demobbed airman iconically linked with the daringphysical heroes of high Stalinism—the Stakhanovite worker, the military pilot, the polarexplorer.34 Skameikin, performed by the adept comic Aleksandr Komissarov, still functionsas Raechka’s skirt-chasing, misadventurous beau, but is politically improved in his newprofession as cannon designer. In deliberate contrast, the villainy of the German vonKneishits is accentuated by his constant sneer, dark clothes, “moustache and greased-back hair”; Richard Taylor argues his equation with Nazism, and even suggests that theright-hand part in his hair would remind audiences of Hitler.35

THE BLUE ANGEL AND DAMSEL MARION

Aleksandrov most transforms Il'f and Petrov’s Under the Big Top by overlaying the comedywith melodrama.36 After the film’s credits, which theatrically herald a change of attractionby posting a bill of Circus over an old bill of Happy Guys, the viewer is presented with thefront page of an American newspaper in which a publicity photo of star Marion Dixon(the film version of Alina) tops a headline announcing her scandalous behavior. Thisupending of theatrical advertisement—the sudden shift from iconic credits to iconicdiscredit—is followed by a shot of the outskirts of an American circus, where an angry,rock-throwing mob chases Marion now wrapped in a shawl like a refugee and clutchinga bundle to her breast. As the frame shifts from capitalist publicity still to socialistdocumentary on raging capitalist injustice, Marion’s image radically mutates from self-possessed star to damsel in distress.37 As she leaps desperately onto a departing train andthrows herself into a compartment, we learn that the bundle is a baby by its wailing,

32Lahusen, “From Laughter,” 39. This amplification includes resurrecting an old vaudeville routine replete withclown costumes and old-fashioned bicycles, an act the manager desperately inserts as filler when the circus’s grandfinale has been delayed. This quotation once again links Circus to the Hollywood musical which, according toFeuer, regularly incorporates “earlier or different entertainment forms” and thereby aims “to evoke nostalgia forbygone entertainment eras, while at the same time asserting that entertainment itself is eternal” (Hollywood Musical,91–92).

33Josephine Woll, “Under the Big Top: America Goes to the Circus,” unpublished manuscript (quoted withpermission from author).

34Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 89; Woll, “Under the Big Top.” Ratchford suggests that the casting of the“wooden” Stoliarov was intended to be a careful corrective of the casting of Utesov in Happy Guys (“Circus of1936,” 88).

35Richard Taylor, “The Illusion of Happiness and the Happiness of Illusion: Grigorii Alexandrov’s Circus,”Slavonic and East European Review 74 (October 1996): 610.

36Frolov, Grigorii Aleksandrov, 61.37Marion’s melodramatic posturing as she flees the mob recalls the broad emotional gestures of silent screen

actresses, invoking such early celluloid victims of capitalism as Vera Kholodnaia. My thanks to Martin A. Millerfor suggesting this specific resemblance. For a superb reading of Vera as victim see Helena Goscilo, “Playing Dead:The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part,” in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodramain Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham, NC, 2002), 287–93.

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although we do not see its face, and we are introduced to her blackmailing impresario inthe German-speaking man surprised by her entrance and immediately alerted to her secretby the newspaper he is reading. At the close of the prologue, the film foreshadows theprogress of the heroine’s flight from West to East as the globe logo on the train car,another capitalist advertisement, is transformed into a beach ball that bounces into theSoviet circus ring. Images of “lightness” and playfulness thus enter the film as positive,Soviet-linked properties.

Aleksandrov’s added prologue fundamentally alters the film’s representation of theheroine, melodramatizing her image and spotlighting her as the star. His blend of musicaland melodrama specifies her duality and enables her tour-de-force performance as abedazzling singer and a suffering heroine. The film’s Marion was Liubov' Orlova, atalented actress with a proficient operetta-suited soprano and a natural sympatheticcharisma on screen who had already made a name for herself as the game serving girl inher husband’s Happy Guys. Her star casting in Circus echoes a common practice inHollywood musicals, for, as film historian Thomas Schatz observes, “the musical tends tobe bound to the star system more closely than any other genre,” presumably because of its“range of dramatic and performance demands” on the star.38 Certainly Circus clinchedOrlova’s stardom, which of all Soviet screen actors most closely approximated studio-eraHollywood treatment, according to Oksana Bulgakowa.39 At the same time, the heroineOrlova plays is problematized by her Western provenance and transgressive sexuality,sins that the melodrama’s “stark ethical conflict” is tailor-made to absolve.40

In Circus a talented American performer is hounded off the stage because she lovesacross color lines. Such a plot could not happen in a contemporary American musical. Inprewar Hollywood, the musical’s heroine primarily faced obstacles to her romanticfulfillment or professional advancement, although some characters flirted with being badas insouciant golddiggers. Several scholars have inferred a different parallel to Marion’scharacter in Lola Lola, the singer Marlene Dietrich played in von Sternberg’s Blue Angel—a classic performance that Aleksandrov obviously knew well. The Blue Angel not onlyestablished Marlene Dietrich as an international star but also coined Dietrich’s enduringscreen persona as the worldly, knowing, bisexually assertive siren. Dietrich’s vocal talentwas negligible, but her extraordinary stage presence, haughty beauty, and manifest sexualpower qualified her as the consummate cabaret diva. Dietrich’s persona, archly displayedin an American series of lavish von Sternberg pictures, was surely ensconced by the mid-1930s. Karina Dobrotvorskaia argues that Orlova’s Marion quotes Dietrich in looks,costuming, allure, and the initials “M.D.,” a name change that Aleksandrov himselfintroduced.41 Bulgakowa fleshes out this comparison by noting similarities in both stars’biographies—their aristocratic family background, military discipline instilled by paternal

38Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 191. See also Feuer, Hollywood Musical, 113.39Bulgakova, “Sovetskie krasavitsy,” 400.40This concept of the melodrama was of course first put forward by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic

Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1979). For close analysisof the melodrama’s redemption of heroines in popular Russian and Polish literature see my “The Importance ofBeing Unhappy, or Why She Died,” in Imitations of Life, 79–98.

41Karina Dobrotvorskaia, “Tsirk G. V. Aleksandrova,” Iskusstvo kino, 1992, no. 11.

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example, and like capacity to preserve their youth and beauty before an adoring public.42

Another parallel deserves note here, but is likely a red herring—that is, how Circusechoes the paired names of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg with the characternames Marion Dixon and Franz von Kneishits.

I argue that Lola Lola, the sophisticated, sexually confident chanteuse of decadent1929 Berlin, serves as a specific point of repulsion for Marion’s development. Lola Lola,as incarnated by Dietrich, must sing in a two-bit waterfront bar in outlandish costumeswith strategically exposed undergarments, but she thoroughly enjoys and controls hersexual allure. In the British Film Institute monograph on The Blue Angel, S. S. Prawerobserves how Dietrich pitches her performance “between enticement and irony” and playsLola Lola as “conscious of the power her looks and her performance skills confer onher—the power to choose among the many kinds of men that respond to her.”43 Symbolicof this power are the large men’s hats she wears when singing about her surrender to love.Although she marries the stuffy German teacher she has unexpectedly attracted, LolaLola remains the breadwinner in their relationship and a free agent in love. Indeed, hertwo performances of her signature love song only convey increasing self-confidence andsexual appetite, projecting first coy invitation and then bold proposition as she sits astrideher chair. Lola Lola also comfortably manages the transitions between dressingroom andstage. Much of the film depicts her before a mirror in the process of preparing for orundressing after a number; she typically invites her male admirers to play voyeur to hernarcissist as she dons a wig or applies her make-up.

In The Blue Angel we first spy Lola Lola in poster version on the street, as a lonecleaning woman looks her over and then attempts to imitate her assertive stance. InCircus Marion’s opposite trajectory describes her demotion from publicity still to real-lifevictim and her persecution rather than imitation by mostly men in the street. We nextview Marion as she grimly prepares for her dangerous act backstage at the Soviet circus,checking her reflection in a mirror of a traveling case that is flanked by a religious statuetteand a crucifix (Fig. 1). She uses her reflection not for self-regard, but to steel herself toperform, and she crosses herself as if preparing for her execution. Marion’s sole companionin this transition is no male admirer, but a fellow sufferer, a somber, helpful clown dressedand made up like Chaplin.44 The costume in which Marion performs shrinks Lola Lola’stop hat into a toy derby and avoids any exposure of undergarments with a high-necked,body-smoothing leotard. Marion shows little flesh and none of Lola Lola’s attitude.When she sings she sits astride no chair, but exudes a cheery professional energy, executinga 1920s-style tap dance atop her cannon and swiveling or sitting with knees together orlegs decorously crossed. Much as the offstage Marion contrasts with Lola Lola’s free andeasy ways through her pose as victim and atoning sinner, so the onstage Marion contrasts

42Bulgakova, “Sovetskie krasavitsy,” 401.43Prawer, The Blue Angel, 49.44Given Aleksandrov’s high assessment of Chaplin, and the assiduousness with which this actor copies the master,

his presence in the film is sympathetic and his stunts presumably offered as examples of comic art. Nonetheless, thisversion of Chaplin, like Marion herself, abjectly serves von Kneishits, and so reinforces the film’s theme of Westerntalent exploited by a fascist impresario.

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as a highly regimented performer, with stylized marionettish movements, a doll-sizedhat, and a carefully pleasing mask (Fig. 2).

FIG. 1 Marion brooding before her circus act. FIG. 2 Marion tapdancing atop her cannon.

In de-Lola-izing Marion, Circus negotiates a dilemma in representation very similarto contemporary Hollywood’s struggle to redeem “fallen women” in genre films rangingfrom melodrama to backstage musicals. As Lea Jacobs details in The Wages of Sin:Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942, the de facto censors in 1930sHollywood, first the Studio Relations Committee and then the Production CodeAdministration, strived to temper the visual and material allure of the woman who cashedin on her sex appeal (that is, beautiful wardrobe, elegantly modern living quarters) bypunishing her or convincing her of the joys of “true love” and everyday domesticity in thepicture’s final reel.45 Hollywood films sought to redirect aggressive female sexuality intosafe coupledom or death and to strike an appealing balance between the heroine’s glamourand goodness.

Circus assays a different sort of redemption of its fallen woman heroine, deeroticizingher sexuality, liberating the authentic human being falsely oppressed by capitalist culture,yet, curiously enough, “naturalizing” rather than renouncing her glamour. Marion Dixonfirst appears to us as a persecuted, terrified mother and thereafter as a performer painfullyambivalent at the prospect of tarting herself up for the crowd and executing a dangerousstunt. The first performance of her little song and dance demonstrates her talent, appeal,and professionalism. Like any Hollywood musical, Circus takes pains to display its popularstar’s musical panache. But Marion’s backstage scenes alone with von Kneishits revertto stock melodrama, documenting her suffering and humiliation—not as a performer perse, but as a woman victimized by a businessman impresario who incarnates and enforcesa sexist, racist, capitalist order. The heroine’s sexual misconduct is only implied throughthis enactment of punishment and contrition. After her first triumphant “flight to themoon,” a jealous von Kneishits throws her to the floor of her dressing room, striking herwith the bouquet that Martynov tossed her in the ring, and Marion lies stricken andprostrate before a gigantic theater poster of her stage face, reiterating the opening scene’sopposition between billboard diva and real-life damsel. In a later encounter in her

45Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (Madison, 1991),40–41.

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sumptuous hotel room, von Kneishits pelts her with the fine clothes in which he has kepther, while she stands, upright and immobile, a statue of renunciatory virtue. Her defiantexpression as well as her words, uttered in English, declare her conversion: “The Maryyou bought these [clothes] for is no more.” As Aleksandrov’s many protracted close-upsunderscore, Marion’s progress is largely about recovering her “true” face and normalizingher life, rendering her an innocent romantic lead, committed worker, and loving mother(Fig. 3).46

FIG. 3 Marion stands up to her keeper von Kneishits.

Marion’s recovery of her unmasked self begins offstage as well, where she performsin musical numbers markedly different from her playful, flirtatious, “put-on” circus song.When Marion meets with Martynov for Russian lessons in her hotel room, the songthrough which they realize their love is not the romantic duet usually featured in theHollywood musical, but Dunaevskii’s famous march “Song of the Motherland,” a patrioticpanoramic song explicitly written for and often performed in the film. This march movesboth romantic leads to lofty expressions, but no consummating kiss. Here and later in thefilm it is Martynov, not Marion, who registers sexual heat only by breaking away from hispartner and playing the dazed buffoon. Once Marion and Martynov have finished singingthe march together, they stand side by side and gaze at their twinned, inspired, propagandaposter-worthy reflections in the grand piano. Marion later projects a different sort of

46In contrast, Circus unmasks von Kneishits as both tormenter and fraud. As John Haynes observes, the German’s“physical attributes are exposed as a sham” when he is shown donning “an inflatable ‘muscle suit’” backstage, thussatirizing “the Nazi cult of fitness and the body.” See Haynes, The New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity inStalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester, 2003), 80.

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unerotic love in her intimate offstage lullaby number, sung in her hotel room as shecaresses and rocks her little boy. The bilingualism of the song titled “Spi moi baby”attests to Marion’s sanguine Soviet acculturation, an important byproduct of her love forMartynov, whereas the song’s genre sentimentally celebrates her motherhood, reinforcingthe impression of her innate purity and goodness.47

It is important to note, however, that the “authentic” Marion thus revealed resistingvon Kneishits, unveiled and uplifted by a politically correct romance, and crooning to herbaby loses none of her visual allure, material affluence, or show-biz professionalism. The

FIG. 4 Marion re-born as a Soviet star.

real Marion proves to be a natural blonde who only dons a brunette wig for her dreadedcircus act. The real Marion may renounce the finery von Kneishits has bought her, butshe wears tasteful, fashionable clothes in her daily life and lives comfortably in a poshmodern hotel suite, complete with a baby grand piano and windows overlooking a neon-outlined Red Square. Indeed, in advertising the appointments and the exterior of thebrand-new Hotel Moskva in Circus, Aleksandrov practically mirrors a Hollywood settypical for the fallen woman heroine.48 And the real Marion, like the indentured Marion,is a dedicated trouper, a performer for all contexts. When Marion observes Raechkarehearsing the new Soviet version of her act, she spontaneously offers the novice pointerson posture and expression. Once she at last flees her tyrant and returns to the circus, she

47Taylor, “Illusion of Happiness,” 614.48Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 53–56, 63–64. Jacobs observes: “By the early thirties, the association between the fallen

woman and art moderne was so well established that it was exploited as a part of a film’s advertising campaign”(ibid., 55).

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volunteers to reprise her flying role not “for dollars,” as the circus manager suspiciouslywonders, but for free.

Ultimately, the birth of the happy sovietized Marion is staged in the expanded spectaclethat constitutes the film’s near finale. Performing gratis under Soviet management, Marionappears as a radiantly enthusiastic blonde who first performs a Stalinist feat of derringdo, flying to the stratosphere in uniform and partnered by Martynov. After her giantparachute drifts down and covers the arena, Marion reemerges from its baptizing folds asthe star soloist atop a chorus of athletically garbed, unisexed women, participating in aseries of ensemble numbers patterned on Busby Berkeley’s geometrical choreography.The female performer is reallied with a new, endorsing collective. Her new costume, along translucent dress worn over a chorus-like leotard, adds a layer of conventionallyfeminine beauty (through which the sportswoman “shows”) and suggests Marion’srevirginalization as well as her enduring glamour. In effect, Circus recovers from thebewigged, exploited American a hybrid Hollywood-Soviet star, transforming Lola Lolainto Deanna Durbin or, more aptly, liberating in the repressed, oppressed diva MarionDixon Liubov' Orlova, an utterly natural and happily integrated performer of the people(Fig. 4).

BLACKFACE AND LITTLE JIMMY

Aleksandrov’s musical comedy performs its other striking act of redemption in integratingMarion’s son. His inclusion of a black boy (as well as several other black characters) wasin itself no innovation, for the theme of American racism recurred quite predictably inStalinist-era literature and film. Stites even pronounces Circus “the culmination of arash of earlier ‘American’ theme films about Indians, Jews, and Blacks who find a safe,nonracist haven in the USSR.”49 Yet given the film’s thematic focus on and import offeatures from Western movies, the appearance of Marion’s mulatto son figures as a boldcorrective to specifically Hollywood practice. As Aleksandrov’s prologue simplistically,but correctly, spells out, the very existence of Marion’s child causes her expulsion froman American society and American culture that tolerates no mixing of the races.

A white woman and her black child could not be featured in an American movingpicture in studio-era Hollywood, and perhaps most particularly in a musical. InDisintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film, ArthurKnight observes Hollywood’s emphatic, but strictly censored linkage of “African Americanswith music and musical performances.”50 African Americans appeared onscreen in thefew predominantly black-cast musicals produced between 1929 and 1959; in discretemusical numbers that could be cut when a film was distributed in the southern UnitedStates; and, of course, as servants to the musical stars. Far more often, however, Americanmusicals indulged in an embarrassing, racist proxy of black “style” through blackfaceperformance.51 Long after blackface minstrelsy had waned in American popular culture,

49Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 89.50Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC,

2002), 1.51Ibid., 30.

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blackface persisted as an odd “nostalgic” staple in vaudeville and then film musicals ofthe 1920s, 30s, and even 40s.52 White blackface performances almost always includedscenes of white performers “blacking up” or “deblacking,” borrowing blackness as anentertaining mask, but assuring the audience of the players’ underlying whiteness.53

Hollywood’s prohibition of authentic black representation, its apprehension of whatMichael Rogin identifies as the American “hysteria over miscegenation,” serves as yetanother key point of repulsion for Aleksandrov’s film.54 Il'f and Petrov had devised theprovocative premise of a white woman with a black son already in Under the Big Top, butAleksandrov is responsible for its more touching, contra-Hollywood development in Circus.In his memoirs he recalls his assistants’ hunt for the right child actor to play Marion’sboy: they first scoured gypsy encampments and then actually contemplated filming achild in blackface.55 Ultimately they discovered little Jimmy Patterson, the one-and-a-half-year-old son of American immigrant Lloyd Patterson and Ukrainian artist VeraAralova.56 Lloyd Patterson had come to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s with “twenty-one other young black men and women ... to participate in a Russian film project designedto address the race problem in the United States.”57 He opted to remain after the projectfailed, painting the interiors of the Metropole Hotel and creating sets for the MeyerholdTheatre—design work inaccessible to him as a black man in the United States, despite hisdegree in interior decorating.58 The soon-to-be child star Jimmy Patterson was livingproof of how one real-life artist fled America to find greater tolerance and professionalopportunity in the USSR.

In Il'f and Petrov’s Under the Big Top Alina’s son is revealed only near the end of theplay, but Aleksandrov ventures more extensive and indulgent exposure in Circus. As Inoted above, we are apprised of the fact, but not the race, of Marion’s child in the prologue.He initially remains wrapped or offscreen as the secret kept by the Western impresarioand his consequently subject star. Von Kneishits threatens to “tell all” in order to curb arebellious Marion, and Marion herself fearfully drowns out the boy’s crying with musicwhen Martynov visits her room. When Jimmy appears at last, wandering into Marion’sdrawing room in a nightshirt and a Red Army soldier’s cap, von Kneishits reacts withvirulently racist comments about his hair and skin (Fig. 5). The child’s blackness, likethe woman’s sexuality, is condemned only by this token fascist/capitalist. Von Kneishits’sugly words are then rebutted and wiped by the moving image of an adorable, vulnerable,and now sobbing little boy, whom Marion at last owns by sweeping him into her arms andhushing his cries. In the ensuing “Lullaby” the camera alternates between shots of the

52Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Los Angeles,1996), 29.

53Knight, Disintegrating the Musical, 50.54Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 25.55Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 202.56Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, “Reclaiming Dzh. Patterson, A Child Star in Grigori Alexandrov’s Circus,” Sound

Historian 18 (2004): 65.57Ibid., 62.58Allison Blakeley, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC, 1986),

155.

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singing mother with child and close-ups of Jimmy, in both cases hallowing their unmaskedfaces and tender physical intimacy (Fig. 6).59

FIG. 5 Von Kneishits insults and FIG. 6 Marion cradles her son. and frightens little Jimmy.

Here and in the film’s penultimate scene Aleksandrov showcases the appealing Jimmy,sometimes at the cost of continuity, and positively dwells on scenes of loving black-whiteinteractions, scenes unimaginable on an American screen where “hysteria overmiscegenation” dictated representation. Jimmy’s blackness is shown to be no mask, asSkameikin discovers when he tries to “clean” his face. Nor is Jimmy to be segregated, ashe would be in American film, from the entertainment world and society at large. Hedoes not sing and dance to justify his presence before white folks, but functions instead asthe cherished subject for whom others of all races are naturally moved to perform. Theauthentic black boy and his relationship to his white mother are exposed at length to thecircus community in a second “Lullaby” sequence that Aleksandrov added to the Il’f andPetrov screenplay. With this scene, the film compounds the musical’s prescribed integrationof couple into community with actual racial integration.60

Jimmy’s spontaneous appearance in the circus ring after Marion’s Busby-Berkeleystylized dance constitutes the real climax of the film, in effect trumping a Hollywood-style stage extravaganza with yet another homegrown musical number that projectsinclusion, compassion, and “real” selves, linking family feeling with patriotic pride andrevealing how the diverse big Soviet family mirrors and supports its little circus subset.The “Lullaby” number is prompted by von Kneishits once again articulating capitalistintolerance. Tracking Marion to the circus ring, a furious von Kneishits declares her“race crime” (rasovoe prestuplenie) and holds up the evidence of her black child to bothcircus troupe and circus audience for vilification. Throughout the film Aleksandrov hasincluded the audience in depicting the circus, spotlighting the overflow of the acts intothe bleachers and the crowd’s behavior and engagement. Hollywood musicals regularly

59This carefully orchestrated scene of racial equality also includes a stock character from contemporary Americanfilms—an African American nanny in starched cap and apron. This episodic figure likely quotes the black maidstypically attending glamorous fallen women in Hollywood film, but her symbolism, like that of the Chaplin look-alike, is not consistently or clearly developed.

60Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 28. See also Martin Sutton, “Patterns of Meaning in the Musical,” in Genre: TheMusical. A Reader, ed. Rick Altman (London, 1981), 193.

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used this shot strategy, as Feuer notes, to “shape the responses of a movie audience to thefilm.”61 The audience that von Kneishits finally seeks to outrage and Aleksandrov uses asrole model is explicitly multiethnic, a microcosm of Soviet nationalities. This crowd, inpointed contrast to the American mob of the prologue, laughs away his ugly rhetoric andliterally embraces Jimmy, removing him bodily from von Kneishits as soldier-patronsmove forward to block the German from pursuit.

FIG. 7 The Soviet audience lullabies little Jimmy.

As the audience passes Jimmy up the stands from one eager protector to another, itspontaneously launches into a multilingual lullaby, embellishing on Marion’s tenderbilingual song. Ordinary audience members steal the show as performers. Their “Lullaby”presents an intriguing Soviet version of the Hollywood musical’s “passed-along song” inwhich a sequence of singers “pass along” verses, a format commonly used in the musicalto “link entertainment to community.”62 A Russian, a Ukrainian, a Georgian, a CentralAsian, a Jew (played by Solomon Mikhoels), and even another black man—openly pairedwith a white woman—all sing Jimmy to sleep, starring briefly as eager surrogate parentsand transforming the bleachers into a gallery of cozy family tableaux (Fig. 7). The fatherlycircus director performs the last verse alone, however, perhaps signaling his official status

61Feuer, Hollywood Musicals, 26.62Ibid., 16–17. Michael Dunne remarks a similar use of the passed-along song in the 1934 Depression-era

musical Stand Up and Cheer: “In this number, a wide variety of representative Americans dressed in realisticcostumes participate in a fantastic performance. Inclusiveness—of gender, geography, race and occupation—is alarge part of the message of this presentational sequence.” See Dunne, American Film: Musical Themes andForms (Jefferson City, NC, 2004), 26.

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as he carries the boy back from the “people” into the public arena and there declares himwelcome.

The loving harmony generated by this “passed-along” lullaby prompts integrationsboth typical and atypical for the Hollywood musical—Raechka and Skameikin’s comicalpledge to wed and the formal inclusion of Marion and little Jimmy (the fallen woman andthe black child) into the circus fold. Jimmy is embraced by his mother, who herself isgathered up in Martynov’s arms, and the three stand approved at center stage as a newlyconstituted family tableau. When a profoundly grateful Marion is moved to reprise “Songof the Motherland,” the camera then wipes from scenes of happy families in the makingto national political spectacle, with Marion, her boy, and her extended circus family joininga May Day-style parade that marches across Red Square and is then superimposed on amultiethnic panoply of marchers. This outdoor sequence effectively bookends the film,implying the seamless connection between the world of the circus and all Soviet societyand broadcasting, through the marching row of smiling principals, a Soviet-basedresolution of tolerance, integration, and politically committed spectacle to the Americanprologue’s violence, banishment, and tawdry show.

What the composite product of Circus tells and demonstrates, then, is the happieraccommodation and fuller realization of Western talent and entertainment in Soviet cultureand society. Like its predecessor The Happy Guys, this more explicitly sovietized musicalaccents the value of entertainment and borrows liberally from the plot elements andproduction strategies of Hollywood musicals—from the pairing of disparate lovers andtheir social integration to the emphasis on and design of its musical numbers. AlthoughCircus overtly celebrates the achievements of the young Soviet Union, featuring exteriorshots of the new Hotel Moskva and happy parades on Red Square, it also remains underthe spell of a sumptuous Hollywood visual aesthetic—as exampled by its well-dressed,effervescent blonde star, her classy hotel suite framing a modern Moscow skyline, and thenear finale of its grand Busby Berkeley production number.

But Circus critiques and redeems as it imports. In lieu of punishing the fallen womanor abandoning her, like Lola Lola, to a cynical status quo, Circus represents and rescuesher as a victim, exposing the tyranny and villainy of her supposed judge, and endorsingher—through song and spectacle—as comrade, mother, and an at last truly inspired Sovietperformer. In lieu of ostracizing or otherwise masking her black son, Circus foregroundsand approves the authentic child, integrating rather than distancing him through newsorts of musical numbers that quite effectively stage maternal or familial love. The film’sfunction of “unmasking” and expelling the fascist villain, reflecting contemporary Stalinistpractices, is complemented by its recovery and embrace of victims wrongly “masked” bycapitalism.63 In contrast to most Hollywood musicals, which, as Richard Dyer firsttheorized, offer utopian solutions to domestic social inadequacies (that is, visions ofabundance versus actual scarcity, a projection of community versus class and racial discord),

63On the film’s “unmasking” of the Soviet enemy see Woll, “Under the Big Top”; and Ratchford, “Circus of1936.” Ratchford argues that “the fascist German is not as formidable as he seems and is merely bloated up withlies and deception. This episode clearly reflects the political pathos of the time, when the ‘razoblachenie,’ orunmasking, of fascist villains became a daily headline in the news and a key element to Stalinist mass politicalritual” (p. 88).

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Circus shrewdly locates such problems overseas, offering strictly Soviet-based solutionsto the Western social inadequacies that Western entertainment abets or represses.64

Unmanning the dirty politics of Western entertainment, screening and cherishing its victimsof misrepresentation, Circus projects the Soviet big top to be the greatest, most inclusiveshow on earth. At the same time Circus proves to its domestic consumers just how morallyredemptive and nationally affirming Soviet entertainment can be, thereby ensuring thatthe show will go on in Aleksandrov’s coming attractions.

64Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” first printed in Movie 24 (Spring 1977) and reprinted in TheCultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London, 1993), 271–83.