Movie Reviews : Ideological Triple-Think in Resurrected Rand Epic

“W hat are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own? I loathe your ideals . . . . Because men are not equal in ability . . . . And because I loathe most of them.”

--Kira, in Ayn Rand’s “We the Living.” Some philosophy, huh?

Post-revolutionary Russia is bathed in the pearly, nacreous light of a ‘30s Hollywood romance and the acid of Ayn Rand’s me-first politics in the astonishing Italian epic, “We the Living” at the Royal).

It’s a movie divided against itself in several ways. Based on the 1936 novel by Ayn Rand, her impassioned fable of the only free girl in Soviet Russia, battling against a squalid gray bureaucracy of bullies, sots, fiends and worms, it was made in Mussolini’s Italy in 1942. Eventually banned by the Fascist regime, it was located in 1968 by Rand and her representatives. They’ve proceeded to bowdlerize it again, removing one hour of the original four, cutting the ending, rewriting the dialogue and redubbing the hero’s climactic speech.

Would any Fascist or Communist censors have been more strict? It’s an amazing piece of ideological triple-think. The movie, in the end, is something like its own heroine: spinning from hand to hand, trying to preserve its ideals while being fondled and bullied on all sides.

Does it survive? Well, at least it’s hugely entertaining in a movie-movie way. In “We the Living,” heroine Kira (Alida Valli) is an aristocrat burning brightly among tyrants and scum. Returning to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, with her aristocrat family, indomitable Kira throws down a gauntlet, battling for the right to build aluminum bridges, dance the fox-trot and love fiercely against a government that gives her nothing but insults and ration cards. Her foes are mustached sneaks and butch female comrades with facial moles.

Rand, as usual, makes her plot heavily schematic. Kira is torn between two lovers who represent opposed ideals: Andrei the tough, idealistic G.P.U. leader (Fosco Giachetti) and Leo, the arrogant aristocrat and admiral’s son (Rossano Brazzi). Fashion-plate Leo, she imagines, is her true love, her “reverenced ideal.” But leather-jacketed Andrei is the guy who bails her out again and again.

It’s a fascinating opposition. The story constantly exhorts us with Rand’s favorite nostrum, the virtue of selfishness, the glory of the “I.” But its hero is actually the selfless Communist, Andrei, who immolates himself for love in a spirit worthy of Sydney Carton or Jean Valjean. Victor Hugo was Rand’s favorite novelist, and “We the Living” is almost a vast crazy inversion of “Les Miserables,” with loathsome peasants persecuting impoverished aristocrats and Andrei as an inverted, protective Javert.

There’s another irony. The turgid Soviet empire here glints with a thousand precious highlights, like satin under chandeliers. The young Valli looks like Garbo and Fosco Giachetti has the weary, rugged virility of a Bogart. They’re both great camera subjects and so is Rossano Brazzi, whose Leo has a petulant, spoiled urbanity.

“We the Living” has some fragile links with post-war neo-realism; director Allesandri was once married to Anna Magnani and the music was composed by Roberto Rossellini’s brother, Renzo. But the film really dwells in that timeless realm of swanky historical romance--where “Gone With the Wind,” “Queen Christina,” and “Forever Amber” all swoon and swirl--far removed from its ostensible ideological battleground.

Rand’s tone, stern, modern, “scientific,” irreligious and hero-worshipping, often, paradoxically, resembles her Marxist opponents’. She’s something of a Marxist-inside-out, an ideologue in steel and silk. And, though she calls this story a spiritual autobiography, she didn’t suffer long in Russia. She fled at 19 to the United States, where she worked for RKO, which probably influenced “We the Living,” (Times-rated Mature for themes and language) more than the Leningrad. Luckily enough, in the movie, despite the Rand-check run on it, you get more silk than ideology.