East Side Story Reviews

Don't walk, run: This may your one and only chance to wallow in the highlights of real, honest-to-God Iron Curtain musicals. You read right: Once upon a time in the Eastern Bloc, that epitome of decadent Western hedonism -- the big Hollywood musical -- was appropriated and put into the service of the State. The attempt to reconcile art, ideology and frothy entertainment sparked innumerable debates among Marxist theorists and inspired angry memos from Party central, so there weren't many Soviet musicals made -- some 40 in as many years. But they were wildly popular with moviegoers, and documentary filmmakers Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn have skimmed what appears to be the cream of the crop: From Grigori Alexandrov's 1934 comedy THE JOLLY FELLOW (banned for being way too entertaining, until movie lover Joseph Stalin himself gave it his seal of approval) to the wonderfully self-reflexive MIDNIGHT REVUE (1962), in which a group of filmmakers are ordered to do the impossible: make a Socialist musical. Backstagers, beach parties, Doris Day romances: Directors in the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Czechoslovakia tried their hands at the full range of all-singing, all-dancing formulas. And if you're expecting an opportunity to get all sniffy about clueless Commie knockoffs of our American spectaculars, you can just leave that bourgeois attitude right at the door: The musical numbers cook. Next up from Ranga and Horn: a retrospective of Soviet sci-fi epics. The mind reels.