SONG OF RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 280, 3 November 1944, Page 15

SONG OF RUSSIA

(M-G-M)

REPENTING of their former obscurantist attitude ~ towards Russia, as displayed in Ninotchka and the Clark Gable

film Comrade A (which was not released in New Zealand), Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer herewith fall into line and proffer this as their special all-star, 98minute, big-gun salute to their great Soviet Ally. It must be confessed, however, that if any national barriers are blown down as a result the credit is due less to M-G-M than to Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovski, whose music was stirringly | conducted off-screen by Albert Coates | while Robert Taylor was going through | the motions in front of the cameras. The Tchaikovski-Coates combination at least ensures that most of the salute is eminently worth listening to. Taylor is supposedly an American maestro who is on a goodwill tour of. pre-war Russia, conducting the works of Tchaikovski with a preference for the piano concerto. He meets Susan Peters who, we are assured, is "just an ordinary little Russian girl from an _ ordinary

Russian village," and a few scenes later is passionately proposing marriage. Momentarily, she is inclined to be cautious (they’re realists, these Russians). It might not work, she hints; after all, their social, cultural, and economic backgrounds are somewhat different. This slightly jarring ideological note is quickly silenced by Maestro Taylor. There will be time enough to think about that later, he says, and goes on to declare, with more fervour than originality: "All that matters is that I love you. We have known each other for ever, and I'll never let you go." So the marriage is Orthodoxly celebrated in the heroine’s little Russian village of Tchaikovskoye and then the happy pair continue their musical mission. But Adolf Hitler pretty soon intervenes to mar Soviet-American bliss and, impelled by Stalin’s Scorched Earth oration (delivered in broken English by an actor with a heavy moustache and an American accent), the heroine returns to help scorch her native village, while the hero goes on conducting Tchaikovski to aid the war effort. Eventually they are reunited amid the ruins of Tchaikovskoye, and the picture ends with them in the United States still busy cementing international understanding by means of the piano concerto. To what extent this pretentious but naive fable achieves its secondary purpose as a tribute to the Russian people may be an open question (its primary objective, of course, is the box-office). But it does at least give thousands of Picturegoers the chance to hear some really good music for a change. In time. they might even be prepared to accept Tchaikovski straight’ without the sugarcoating of Taylor.