86
PARTISAN REVIEW
acting, Soviet audiences do not seem to mind seriously the type of
film
which features good old-fashioned theatricalism, with heaving
bosoms, exaggerated gestures, artificial pauses, and everything heavi–
ly underscored.ma
At the height of the great period of Soviet cinema, one finds the
masses showing a preference for the Hollywood product. The popular
success of the 1925 season in Moscow was not
Potemkin
but Douglas
Fairbanks in
The Thief of Bagdad.
"American films," Paxton Hibben
wrote in 1925, "dominate, inundate, glut, overwhelm the Russian
motion picture houses today. Clara Kimball Young has a theatre
solely devoted to her in Moscow."
115
Unable to afford to import
enough American films to supply· the demand, Soviet studios turned
out imitation 'Amerikansky Kartiny,' with 'American' lighting, cam–
era tricks, and fast action. Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford had
their Russian incarnations. Bolshevik Buster Keatons were chased
by
OGPU-Keystone cops around the ·Red Square. These films played
to packed houses.
116
When Sovkino issued a report showing large
profits for 1927, the bureaucrat Yaroslavsky complained: "Neither
Mother
nor
Potemkin
was produced by Sovkino, which prefers quick
profits on foreign bourgeois films to building up home products suit–
able for workers and peasants." He criticized Sovkino sharply for
signalizing the tenth anniversary of 1917 with a showing of the Hol–
lywood film,
Scaramouche,
with great profit. The difficulty, he ad·
mitted, was that audiences seemed to prefer "the comic, picturesque
or adventurous pictures front America" to the esthetically and polit–
ically superior Soviet productions.
117
So too with the popular response
to the Russian films themselves. Pudovkin's
The End of St. Petersburg,
which at least had a hero and a plot, was more popular than Eisen–
stein's
October,
more interesting esthetically but also more difficult.
111
Two years later, Pudovkin's
Storm Over Asia
was more enthusiast·
ically received inside Russia, and for the same reasons, than Eisen–
stein's
The General Line.
119
Probably the greatest box-office
succes~
among all Russian films has been
Chapayeu,
which is well described
as "a talking film of normal technique."
The Problem of Mass Taste
The Russian masses like the Hollywood type of film. Therefore,
the world's premier democracy should give them such films, which
it is now doing. So runs the simple reasoning of the Stalinists. All
too
simple. The matter is not as mechanical as that.
There is, for example, in Moscow the Museum of Western
Art,
which contains a famous collection of modern French paintings, from
