Engaging ‘East Side’ Tells History of Socialist Musicals

You’ve never seen anything like “East Side Story,” but then again neither has anyone else. At least not on this side of the former Iron Curtain. Smart and sassy, this smashingly entertaining documentary introduces the West to the world of socialist musicals, a genre so unlikely even its creators were often chagrined at what they’d accomplished.

Imagine, if you can, hearty machinists bursting into a chorus of “in the hot blast of the coal oven, the coal press begins to stomp.” Or ecstatically happy peasants taking part in a stupendous wheat harvest choreographed to the rhythms of massive machinery. Or a glamorous swineherd singing, “Hey, piggies, time to eat, come to your trough and have a little meal.” It’s all here, and more.

But “East Side Story” is not just a “That’s Entertainment!” compiled from communism’s most eye-popping production numbers. As put together by Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn (she directed, he produced, they co-wrote), the film examines how these unlikely epics came to life in the face of serious obstacles. And it does so with irresistible style, typified by a puckish thank-you to Karl Marx, “without whom none of this would have been necessary.”

“A socialist musical film has to be a crazy idea,” says the movie’s sly voice-over, partly because “fun and music in a world of ambiguity and suspicion” is an unlikely scenario. Also, the seriousness of socialism, its humorless determination to raise the political consciousness of the working class, led party functionaries to dismiss mere entertainment as unworthy of the great cause.

Yet some 40 socialist musicals with catchy titles like “Tractor Drivers” and “Cossacks of the Kuban River” were made behind the Iron Curtain, mostly in the USSR and East Germany but with stubborn outcroppings in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. “East Side Story” uses a generous selection of clips and pithy interviews with experts, participants and ordinary fans to show how the impossible came to be.

It all started with Russian Grigory Alexandrov and his unlikely patrons in high places. Alexandrov was the great Sergei Eisenstein’s assistant director, but after the two of them returned from a 1931 trip to Hollywood, Alexandrov went out on his own and made the first Soviet musical, the merry, syncopated “The Jolly Fellows.”

Naturally, the film was promptly banned, but Alexandrov took it to writer Maxim Gorky, who liked it so much he personally showed it to Joseph Stalin himself. Against considerable odds, Stalin was wowed, allegedly commenting that “anyone who made a movie as funny as this has to be a brave man.”

With backing that potent, Alexandrov and his actress wife, Lyubov Orlova (who was so popular she regularly got fan letters signed by thousands), were able to make several musicals, including the celebrated “Volga Volga” about local talent determined to make it big in Moscow. That film was Stalin’s favorite: He watched it more than 100 times and even gave a copy to wartime ally Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose own reaction is not recorded.

Both Alexandrov and the other key Soviet musical director, Ivan Pyriev, created dreams, but they were specifically Communist ones, where optimistic workers were always smiling and fulfilling quotas was a joy not a duty. But when Stalin died, the heart went out of the USSR musical, and it fell to the German Democratic Republic to pick up the slack.

But not right away. The East German film bureaucrats preferred to turn out turgid tales like “Ernest Thalmann, Class Leader” that idealized the heroic albeit boring struggle against capitalism. But in the days before the Berlin Wall, what East German audiences preferred was to cross over and spend their money on the potent fantasies that Hollywood produced. Entertainment, it turned out, had a powerful imperative of its own.

So, reports actress Karin Schroder, known in her heyday as “the Doris Day of the East,” the GDR power structure, having determined that “we have attractive people, we have sex, we have all that here,” decided to go into the musical business themselves and pocket the profits.

Their first product, 1958’s “My Wife Wants to Sing,” starring a former Miss Bavaria and the actor who’d played Ernest Thalmann, boasted the daring theme that communism supported women who wanted to work. It was an immediate hit even in the Soviet Union, where it earned 11 million rubles in just four weeks.

Eventually East Germany got bold enough to attempt brassy teen musicals with names like “Hot Summer” and “No Cheating Darling,” but the lack of governmental support and recognition--not to mention that the shoots used so much electricity they threatened the power supply of entire cities--led inevitably to their extinction.

Even in their heyday, what with lack of experienced personnel and official pronouncements condemning them as “the most flagrant offspring of the capitalist pleasure industry,” creating these musicals was never easy. In fact one of the most charming of the East German films, “Midnight Review,” focused on the difficulties and featured a lyric complaining:

“It’s enough to make you tear your hair out!

It’s easier to wait 10 years for a car.

It’s simpler to go ice-skating in the desert

Than to make a socialist musical!”

Viewed today, the clips featured here are both musically engaging and endearing in their earnestness, a view of an intriguing parallel universe influenced by Hollywood but doing things not quite the same way. “Who knows,” “East Side Story” asks with a tinge of regret, “how things would have turned out if socialism could just have been more fun?” How indeed.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: all talking, all singing, all dancing.

‘East Side Story’

An ANDA Films/ WDR/ DocStar/ Canal+ production, released by Kino International. Director Dana Ranga. Producer Andrew Horn. Screenplay Dana Ranga, Andrew Horn. Cinematographer Mark Daniels. Editor Guido Krajewski. Costumes Suse Brown. Sound Heino Herrenbruck, Martin Ehlers. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.