1h 47min | Drama, Music, Romance, War | February 1944
Directors: Gregory Ratoff, Laslo Benedek (uncredited)
Stars: Robert Taylor, Susan Peters, John Hodiak, Robert Benchley
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036378/
Watched online; blurry print.
The vast majority of the Soundtracks are by Tchaikovsky, who is honored in the film by a town named after him, and by crediting various musical works to him. So there's a lot of music and it's very good (for when you're in the mood for Russian symphonic comps.)
We get battle footage injected a couple of times. And, like The North Star ('43, Goldwyn/RKO), we get civilians strafed in their farm fields, with a child dying (Darryl Hickman, playing 12 y.o.). Both films show or talk about villagers setting fire to their own property to keep it out of Nazi hands.
SP (b. 1921) plays a very heroic young Russian woman, matched well with American conductor RT (b. 1911). Both are accomplished, musical, and have high ideals. Their romance and marriage begins before the Nazi invasion, and survives.
Instead of touring with her husband (she is a concert pianist), SP wants to return to her village when the war begins for USSR. But even her villagers (voiced by John Hodiak) want her to return to America with RT to spread the word of the brutal destruction they've witnessed, and the great citizenry they've met, so that America will join the war (USSR was invaded in June '41). So we close on them giving a concert performance, presumed in the USA.
This really isn't pro-Communist. At least I didn't see any arguments for, or even descriptions of, their economic/governmental system. But it is very heavily pro-involvement in the war, which is silly, because this is released in '44, and we're in it up to our necks. So I should describe it instead as a morale-booster, to REMIND us why we're sending our young men overseas.
I wonder how long will it take after the war for musicals to ignore the war. I'm certainly tired of it; imagine what it was like to live with the rationing and the worry. Ugh.
MGM, dir. Ratoff & Benedek; 6
