Turner Classic Movies Presents: Shadows of Russia

This month TCM is running a fascinating series, Shadows of Russia, a history of Russia and the Soviet Union as seen through Hollywood’s lens. If you care about movies and politics, you should check out these movies.

The idea for this series originated with the fine film blogger Self-Styled Siren and the New York Post’s Lou Lumenick. Self-Styled Siren explains how it came about here.

Marlene Dietrich, The Scarlett Empress, 1934.

First up, Josef von Sternberg’s—real name Jonas Sternberg—The Scarlett Empress, 1934, starring Marlene Dietrich as Catherine The Great. Catherine was born to an obscure noblemen of the tiny and dirt poor realm of Anhalt-Zerbst. She was brilliant, precocious and, ah, not too attractive.

Hollywood being Hollywood—thank heavens—rewrites and recasts history in a big way. Marlene Dietrich first appears as an innocent young girl, all blond ringlets—very Shirley Temple. It’s great seeing Dietrich do a virgin: she pouts and poses, melding innocence and nymphomania.

When asked what she would like to be when she grows up, Dietrich sighs: “I want to be a toe dancer.” The real Catherine at age fourteen announced: “I want to be a philosopher.” And she wrote a long treatise to back up her ambitions.

The Scarlett Empress is a deliriously romantic view of Tsarist Russia. It’s von Sternberg letting loose with unbridled glamor mixed with string doses of sado-masochism. Scenes of Tsarist torture verge on soft-core porn, naked women being whipped, and Dietrich wielding a whip with vicious joy. It’s exotic escapist fare for Depression-era audiences that holds up beautifully in post-modern times. If you think Avatar is dazzling—I vote for migraine inducing—take a look at The Scarlett Empress. The Gothic sets are jaw dropping, with heavy, twenty foot doorways that can only be opened by a dozen people.

This is Hollywood myth making at its best, or worst. Catherine the Great becomes the tale of an innocent who is forced to marry a troll—Sam Jaffe as Peter, eyes bulging like a gargoyle. Finding herself at war with a wicked and corrupt court, she uses sex and brains to triumph over evil.

In short, Hollywood burnishes Tsarist Russia into a romantic fairy tale. There are no starving peasants. Stud Cossacks parade in fabulous uniforms, never committing anti-Jewish pogroms. It’s an insular royal world that Hollywood views with deep sympathy.

The Scarlett Empress is also about fur. Never in any movie have I seen so many fur capes, fur coats, fur hats, fur blankets, and fur gloves. The costumes by the uncredited Travis Banton are brilliant. Banton, unlike say Adrian, was not that interested in silhouette. Banton emphasized shape and texture, creating complex layers of surface detail.

Here’s my suggestion: Grab your local PETA member, sit them down and screen The Scarlett Empress.

Watch the madness unfold.

John Barrymore and his brother Lionel Barrymore square off in Rasputin and the Empress, 1934.

Speaking of madness, the next film Rasputin and the Empress, 1934, focuses once again on monarchist Russia, this time with Rasputin the mad monk at the center of court intrigue.

Rasputin, a Russian mystic and healer, strongly influenced the latter days of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia.

As with The Scarlett Empress, the Russian monarchy is viewed with affection and sympathy. John Barrymore plays Prince Paul Chegodieff, who sounds suspiciously like an American Jeffersonian. Ethel Barrymore plays the Tsarina with admirable restraint. Worried sick over her beloved son’s frail condition, she allows Rasputin, Lionel Barrymore—this is the only film in which all three Barrymore’s appeared together—to “heal” Czarevitch Alexis ‘Aloysha’, the young prince. Rasputin, as envisioned by screenwriter Charles MaCarthur, is a sort of new age guru who uses hypnotism and solemn religious pronouncements to weasel his way into the royal court.

It’s fun watching Lionel Barrymore tug at his long beard and yup, once again we get the bulging eyeballs.

Naturally, the Tsar is a sweetheart. He might be weak and indecisive, but says the film, he means well. In fact, right before he’s murdered by the Bolsheviks, Nicholas urges that the Duma adopt his ideas for Democratic reform. There is no sense that Nicholas was a vicious anti-Semite who sanctioned murderous pogroms. He was also something of a momma’s boy and by all accounts not too bright.

Rasputin and the Empress does not dazzle like The Scarlett Empress—though Lionel and John chew the scenery like mad—but thematically the two films are blood brothers, which only goes to show that Hollywood myth making is unusually regimented.

We skip ahead to 1949. The Red Danube is the story of a Russian ballerina, Janet Leigh, who is being forced to repatriate from Vienna to Russia. Walter Pidgeon is the British officer assigned to cooperate with the Russian Communists in the repatriation process. Peter Lawford, Pidgeon’s military aide, falls in love with Leigh and, of course, is caught between duty and love.

This is a deeply flawed, but fascinating movie. The narrative does not shy away from the genuine horror of those who know that they face torture and murder when they return to Stalin’s Russia. And yet there are dopey scenes—mostly involving the lovely Angela Landsbury—that are designed to change the tone of the movie as if to say: Look, people might be committing suicide rather than return to Communist Russia, but hey, lighten up.

The Red Danube emphasizes the fact that the Russian Communists were a bunch of totalitarian thugs and murderers. Notable is the emphasis on religion. Ethel Barrymore plays Mother Auxilia, a Mother Superior who is the relentless conscience of the film. It’s a refreshing take on post World War II Cold War political intrigue and in spite of the film’s whiplash tone, I found myself deeply moved by the tragic romance at the heart of The Red Danube.

Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty, stylish in Reds, 1981.

The Shadows of Russia series bounces to Reds, 1981. Over three hours long, Reds was the last American movie with an intermission.

I DVR’d this epic and I’m here to confess that I took several unofficial intermissions.

Look, I don’t expect Hollywood movies to be faithful to history. That’s not what we do. But gee, somewhere along the way there should be some perspective.

David Lean already used the Russian revolution as the canvas for an epic romance. But Lean’s Dr. Zhivago was anti-Communist, as was the novel, a powerful indictment of Communist rule.

Warren Beatty takes Socialists, Communists, Feminists, the, um, lovable, lyrical left, stirs them into one huge pot and comes out with a triumphant Bolshevism. Okay, they’re not as Beatty’s idealistic John Reed envisions, but as he patiently explains to anarchist-kvetch Emma Goldman, Maureen Stapleton: “This is just the beginning.”

Reds is an old-fashioned romance. Beatty plays John  Reed, a Harvard educated radical who has an affair and finally marries Louise Bryant, Diane Keaton, a bohemian-feminist-leftist artist.

At the core, Reds is about an attractive two-career, bi-coastal couple and their desperate attempts to make their relationship work.

Reed hangs with anarchist-scold Emma Goldman, organizes and orates for the Industrial Workers of the World, while Bryant jealously tags along all the while complaining that nobody takes her work seriously.

It’s all a very 1980’s zeitgeist.

Uncredited work on the script was done by veterans Robert Towne and Elaine May.

May’s lighter touch is most evident in the scenes where Beatty and Keaton play political versions of Tracy-Hepburn comedies: the ambitious female coupled with the sympathetic but unconsciously paternalistic male.

The first half of the film concerns Reed and Bryant as they try to work out personal and professional rules. Keaton is at turns shrill, ditzy and sexually opportunistic. Keaton’s scenes with Jack Nicholson’s cynical playwrite Eugene O’Neill are particularly sharp as Nicholson expresses contempt for middle class radicals. It’s a nice touch and one can’t help but admire Beatty’s, um, dialectical self-criticism.

But in the second half of the film, as Reed is stuck in Russia and Bryant treks across the vast snow-covered tundra to reunite with him, the narrative loses focus. We get snooze-inducing scenes that involve the Soviet Comintern and the split between the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party.

Reds is in love with the flawed nobility of Reed, Bryant and Goldman. Naturally, Beatty never alludes to the murderous Bolshevik purges of Mensheviks and politically suspect peasants. And—here we go again—absent is the malignant Jew-hatred and pogroms that have always been at the service of international Communism. In the one big scene where Reed angrily confronts his Soviet masters the motivating force is a political officer who rewrites one of Reed’s dispatches.

Talk about Commie chutzpah.

Reds is lovely to behold, the muted tones and artfully layered schmattes are all very Ralph Lauren. In fact, as I was watching the film my wife would, occasionally look up from her work—she’s a real person with a real job, a psychologist, in contrast to yours truly, a Hollywood screenwriter—and deliver her cinematic analysis: “Stupid movie—but love Keaton’s hats.”

Ultimately, the message of Reds is: forget Stalin’s murder of 50 million people. Forget the government created famines. Forget the gulags. Forget the almost unfathomable misery unleashed by Communism.

They meant well.

© Robert J. Avrech