RED BLUES

By RICHARD CORLISS

There's one simple explanation for the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism: we had Astaire and Marilyn; all they had were boy-loves-tractor pictures. As the battle of the ideologies was fought on movie screens around the world, the edifying drabness of Soviet-bloc films couldn't compete with America's glamorous, sexy, lilting pop culture. As Dana Ranga, director of the terrific documentary East Side Story, puts it, "A specter was haunting communism: the specter of Hollywood."

Now and then, Communist filmmakers tried entertaining the masses with what the official press derisively called "the most flagrant offspring of the capitalist pleasure industry": musical comedies. East Side Story is the history of that glorious, doomed attempt to create an all-singing, all-dancing genre within the unsmiling dictates of socialist realism.

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; it's "too hot!"

This plot was no joke. Many Commusicals were censored for having a decadent Westernized tone. As an officious official bellows to a young dancer in Carnival Night (U.S.S.R., 1957), "We want to raise the consciousness of our workers. But what do you expect to raise with naked legs?" Only about 40 Soviet-bloc musicals were made in 40 years, from The Jolly Fellows to the glossy, ginchy No Cheating, Darling (G.D.R., 1973). Yet these films brought vigorous fun to an audience starved for it. Their makers deserved to be named Heroes of the Soviet People.

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 ban.

The 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.

The Russian musical died with Stalin, but the '50s and '60s saw a little bloom in Soviet-bloc musicals that were much more in step with Hollywood films. In three 1965 movies you'll see a dapper gent figure-skating around a woman in her bedroom (the Czech-East German The Wayward Wife), a DayGlo-bright production number in a spa (Woman on the Rails, Czechoslovakia), a Bulgarian Connie Francis in full taunt (The Antique Coin). But the syncopated clock was ticking; Commusicals fizzled out, as Hollywood song shows did, in the early '70s.

Beautifully assembled by Ranga and producer Andrew Horn, East Side Story reveals the need for fantasy in any social system. Now the "wonderful dream" of Soviet socialism is dead; and these films, reviled in their time, still live. Thirty or 60 years later, in their passionate innocence, they sing to us.

--By Richard Corliss