Film Review: Circus (Tsirk, 1936)

American right-wingers who like to describe President Biden and his supporters as "Communists" aren't completely off the mark. If we consider "wokeness" as the official ideology of today's America, we might find some interesting (and, for some, quite disturbing) parallels with similar phenomena in the past. In the 1930s, the most "woke" country in the world, at least in today's meaning of the word, was Stalin's Soviet Union. Such a conclusion is difficult to avoid if we consider the main plot premise of Circus, a 1936 Soviet musical comedy directed by Grigori Aleksandrov.

The film is based on Under the Circus Dome, a 1934 stage play by Ilf and Petrov. The plot begins somewhere in the United States when Marion Dixon (played by Lyubov Orlova), once a popular circus entertainer, is publicly disgraced after the discovery of having a mixed-race son called Jimmy (played by James Patterson). After barely escaping a lynch mob, she is taken under the wings of Franz von Kneishitz (played by Pavel Massalsky), a German theatrical agent who would sexually and financially exploit her. During their world tour, they end up in Moscow, where Marion performs a spectacular "Trip to the Moon" act. This catches the attention of Ludvig Ossipovich (played by Vladimir Volodin), a Soviet circus manager who brings Ivan Petrovich Martynov (played by Sergei Stolyarov) to help develop an even more spectacular act like Marion's. That doesn't prevent Marion from falling in love with Martynov, which makes Kneishitz jealous. He tries to wreck Marion's romance, first by trying to falsely implicate her with Skameikin (played by Vladimir Komissarov), the bumbling fiancé of Osipovich's daughter Rayechka (played by Yevgeniya Melnikova). When that doesn't work, he tries to turn the Soviet audience against her by revealing her terrible secret.

Like almost any Soviet film made in the 1930s, the main purpose of Circus is propaganda, aimed at convincing anyone that the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin is the best country in the world. The script, while not exactly subtle in its intention, takes an indirect approach by showing the emerging socialist paradise from the perspectives of outsiders coming from the seemingly prosperous and developed, but actually quite backward and oppressive West. The protagonist comes from the USA, which is still under the grip of institutional racism and experiencing all kinds of economic woes of the Great Depression; the main villain comes from Germany, a country whose Nazi government has recently begun to pass abhorrent racial laws. In the Soviet Union, however, Marion sees a new, more tolerant and enlightened society which has erased not only the difference between classes but also between various races and ethnicities who live in perfect harmony. This is best shown in the melodramatic scene near the end, when Kneishitz tries to turn the circus audience against Marion by showing her mixed-race child, but the crowd, much to his horror, actually adopts the toddler as their own. This is followed by "International Lullaby", in which various members of the audience sing to Jimmy in different languages – Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Georgian and Uzbek. This vision of the Soviet Union as a multi-ethnic and multi-racial utopia is what the Soviets like to project both to the outside world and to the domestic audience.

Circus is propaganda, but it is quite effective propaganda, mainly because it comes not in the form of a grand (and often boring) historical epic but in the form of light entertainment. Grigori Aleksandrov, a director known as one of the early collaborators and followers of Sergei Eisenstein, definitely feels more at home when making musical comedies. Circus, unlike his previous film Jolly Fellows, is burdened with politics, but Aleksandrov does everything in his power to make the audience not notice it. He does so with the use of cheap melodrama, likeable musical numbers and plenty of comedy, including a subplot involving Skaimeikin and Rayechka. He also doesn't shy away from showing the influence of Western films, including those of Charlie Chaplin, whose impersonator, played by Nikolai Otto, appears in the film. The main villain Kneishitz in one scene even looks like Bela Lugosi in Dracula and literally vanishes into thin air, bringing the film into the realm of fantasy. Not all of Aleksandrov's experiments work, and there are some quite dark scenes involving violence that are at odds with the light-hearted rest of the film. On the other hand, Aleksandrov's wife and muse Lyubov Orlova delivers an excellent performance, during which she speaks Russian with a heavy foreign accent (and English with a clear lack of a proper dialogue coach), and she contributes a lot to the general success of the film. The same can be said of composer Isaak Dunayevsky, whose song "Wide Is My Motherland" became incredibly popular and turned into one of the Soviet patriotic standards. The song is performed at the very end when the characters of Marion and Martynovich proudly march on the streets of Moscow during a May Day parade, accompanied by a great picture of Stalin. It is only at that moment when Circus finally begins to wear its propaganda purpose on its sleeve. And the modern audience, familiar with the millions who perished in the famine that preceded this film and the Great Purge that would begin shortly after its premiere, would have serious problems accepting such a utopian vision of the Soviet Union, especially in light of the fact that Solomon Mihoels, one of the actors singing "International Lullaby", became a victim of Stalin's persecution in 1948 and had his scene cut from the film (only to be restored during the period of Destalinisation). Yet, despite those limitations, Aleksandrov's film still represents an interesting and at times very entertaining piece of cinema.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
Leofinance blog https://leofinance.io/@drax.leo

Unstoppable Domains: https://unstoppabledomains.com/?ref=3fc23fc42c1b417
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Bitcoin Lightning HIVE donations: https://v4v.app/v1/lnurlp/qrcode/drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7