East Side Story
               
Director: Dana Ranga
Year: 1997
Rating: 7.0
I am a big fan of musicals. Always have been. I love the big brash MGM musicals, the elegant Astaire musicals, the muscular Kelly ones, Busby Berkeley at Warner Brothers - not just American films though but pretty much wherever I can find them - India of course but Thailand has some as does Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Egypt, France, England. There is simply a joy in musicals that no other genre has. They make me want to get up and dance on the tabletop or down the street or at least they did when I was younger and could get up on a tabletop. Which gets me finally to this film.  It is an affectionate documentary about musicals from behind the Iron Curtain from the 1930s through the 1960s. There were not a lot of them - some 40 the narrator tells us - and each one was a fight to make between entertaining the audience and propagandizing them. Clearly propaganda won out most of the time.  All their films had to be approved.

 

Russia's first musical was The Jolly Fellows in 1934 which was initially banned until Gorky saw it and took it to Stalin. There were two good things about Stalin. He was a big movie buff and he finally died.  He loved The Jolly Fellows and musicals were in for a while - two very good ones that I have seen are Volga Volga and Spring - but most of them either took place on communes or in factories - thus accomplishing both entertainment and propaganda. Tractor Drivers and The Swineherd and the Shepard don't make you want to rush out and watch them. When Stalin died, so did the Russian musical. But it was picked up in East Germany to some degree. There was no Stalin there who loved movies and musicals and so trying to get approval for a musical was a long journey.  A few of them look delightful - clearly influenced by Hollywood musicals - one actress was called the Doris Day of Communism.



But I would love to track down ones like My Wife Wants to Sing, about a wife who wants to work; Midnight Revue about making a musical, The Lovable White Mouse which was enormously popular and Hot Summer which looks to be a Socialist Beach Party movie. Clips were also shown of a few musicals from Romania that looked cool - I Don't Want to Marry and Vacation on the Black Sea - or Poland's Adventures in Marienstadt and Czechoslovakia had a couple - The Wayward Wife and Woman on the Rails. One thing I have realized is that every language sounds better when it is being sung. 76 minutes.