NATASHA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 10

NATASHA

| (Lenfilms)

ONE of the lesser benefits of the Anglo Russian accord is that we do now Occasionally get a_ belated chance to see a Soviet film,

and what’s more, we can go to see it quite openly in a public theatre, whereas until a year or so ago you could practically have counted on the fingers of your clenched fist the number of people in New Zealand who had managed to take even a semi-surreptitious peep at the works of such Old Russian Masters as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Unfortunately, our officially-blessed introduction to the cinema industry of the U.S.S.R. has taken place a bit too late for us to get the best out of it. The trouble is that just when Russian films have become respectable they have also tended to become dull-at least by comparison with some of their predecessors, though not necessarily by comparison with contemporary productions from Hollywood and Great Britain. I didn’t see many of the early masterpieces, but I did see Turk-Sib, Potemkin and Storm Over Asia; and I saw enough to make me think now that some of the light has gone out of Russian films. It is probably the light of fanaticism, but it did give a quality of excitement and daring experiment to those early efforts which shone past all the obvious pro-

paganda. Then they were still fighting the Revolution on the screen; they were prophets with a gospel to establish against the opposition of the entire world, But now that the Revolution is an accepted fact, Russian films have inclined to grow pedantic; the prophets have become pedagogues; fanatical faith has been replaced by studied preaching, However, if you forget the past and compare it only with what is being done in the present, there is enough real cinematic merit in such a comparatively recent production as Natasha to make it well worth study, and for it to be an object lesson to those producers and picture-goers who believe that all heroines must be glamour girls, Natasha (played by Zoya Fyodorova), is a young peasant who becomes a Red Cross nurse, in charge of a detachment of frontoviye podrugi ("front line girlfriends"), who appear to be almost as expert at causing wounds among the Nazis as at curing them among the Russians. She has a romance (which is incidental to the plot), and twice we see her in a night-gown: apart from this the film almost seems to go out of its way to disguise the femininity of Natasha and her assistant-nurses, and to make it clear that they are doing a man-size job, even to the extent of using a rifle or machine-gun on occasions. In _ thick uniforms practically identical with those of the soldiers, which make them into shapeless lumps, these sturdy, cheerful, and courageous girls fight cold, disease, pain, despair-and Nazis-in the front line outside Leningrad, and the cinema turns it all into a plain, sturdy documentary record which is mostly so sincere that it is often easy to forget that

the primary purpose is not entertainment but propaganda. The "dubbing-in" of English dialogue is for the most part very well donebut would a Russian girl use such a bourgeois term as "fiancé"?