72
PARTISAN REVIEW
study. Certainly in recent weeks the
Cameo should have supplied you with
'cases in point'.
Lenin in October
is some–
thing of a set-up; as the
Times
critic did
not say, it .was bad history, bad biography,
and above all bad dnema. What I'd like to
call your attention to-if you haven't al–
ready seen and considered it-is
TheCoun–
Iry Bride.
This was the film that won some
Soviet award for being the most realistic
motion-picture of contemporary Russian
life (probably the only motion-picture of
C. R. 1.) . But the realism was amazing as
Lenfilm took over the whole Hollywood
technique of musicomedy. After the fashion
of Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler, the collective
farm at every other opportunity breaks into
song collectively, makes love collectively,–
the farcial mass activities that waitresses
and stenographers indulge in in Hollywood
films. But does Hollywood pretend this to
be realism ?
One point I should like to see you make
-I made it in some of my reviews for the
City College
Campus-is
that the Soviet
cinema is presenting a very extraordinary
paradox. For years we had been asking the
studios, ever shaking in the ten days
~hat
shook the world, to bring up their omer:J.s
to contemporary Russia, and give
US
a
glimpse of socialism, twenty years after.
The paradox is that the Soviet cinema has
come closer to the present by moving back
to the past- to the eighteenth century as
in
Peter the Firsl,
a most revealing (as
you suggested) Soviet document. Here was
a suggestion, clear and unmistakable, of
contemporary attitudes - hero - worship,
idolatry,-and movements-fierce belliger–
ent nationalism-that few Soviet films have
yielded: intentionally or no.
Yours sincerely,
MELVIN
J.
LASKY.
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st~oge
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You make the clearest and
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