Grigorii Aleksandrov: Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows (1934)
Directed by Grigori Alexandrov. Cast: Leonid Utesov, Lyubov Orlova, Maria Strelkova, Elena Tyapkina. Mosfilm, 1934.
Jolly Fellows (Веселые ребята, 1934) announced the arrival of Stalinist popular culture with a burst of music, slapstick, and barely contained chaos. Directed by Grigori Alexandrov — fresh from travels with Eisenstein to Hollywood and Mexico — the film follows Kostya, a bumbling shepherd from the Black Sea resort town of Gagra whose musical talent propels him from barnyard comedy to the Moscow Philharmonic concert stage. Along the way, cattle invade a mansion, a jazz band demolishes a banquet, and a corpse refuses to stay dead. Soviet cultural bureaucrats debated whether its freewheeling comedy and American-inflected jazz rhythms were appropriate for socialist audiences. Stalin reportedly loved it, and his endorsement settled the argument. The score by Isaak Dunayevsky, with lyrics by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, produced some of the most durable earworms in Soviet cultural memory. Leonid Utesov played Kostya with loose-limbed ease, while Lyubov Orlova — who would become the defining female star of the Stalin era — made her film breakthrough as Anyuta.