Василиса Прекрасная
USSR, 1939, black and white, 72 mins
The second film by director Alexander Row (1906-1973), who throughout his four-decade career specialised almost exclusively in fairytale fantasies (long after they were dismissed as the second-class citizens of Soviet cinema), Vassilisa the Beautiful is based on a famous Russian folk tale about a young maiden cursed by an evil serpent after she spurns his advances, and who is finally freed from its clutches by the love of an honest man.
Viewed today, it comes across pretty standard children’s fare (though entertaining enough), but back in 1939 it must have seemed much newer, traditional Russian folk tales not having provided much source material for films in the past. The first seems to have been the Pushkin adaptation Ruslan and Ludmila (Руслан и Людмиа) from 1938, also starring Sergei Stolyarov). And since the film was shot when Stalin’s Terror was at its height and released the year of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, it’s tempting to read various coded messages into this, not least because the film’s relentlessly Manichean championing of good versus evil, light versus darkness and beauty versus ugliness seems to reflect a yearning for a better, simpler world than the one that produced it. There’s no explicit sign that it was influenced by the previous year’s Eisenstein epic, Alexander Nevsky (Александр Невский), but it’s certainly suffused with the same spirit.
Lead actor Sergei Stolyarov (1911-1969) had in fact spent the early part of his career playing explicitly ideologised blond proletarian “heroes of the people” in such films as Alexander Dovzhenko’s Aerograd (Аэроград, 1935) and Grigori Alexandrov’s The Circus (Цирк, 1936), a musical paean to racial tolerance released at a point when other kinds of tolerance were in all too scarce supply. But he was peripherally caught up in the Terror, when a friend and colleague (cameraman Vladimir Nilsen) was denounced and shot, and although Stolyarov survived, his attempt to defend Nilsen’s reputation caused him to be blacklisted as far as a continuation of his earlier work was concerned: he was no longer an “approved social hero”.
So he turned to fairy tales, drawing on his own rural roots to recast his previous characters as heroic fantasy figures clad in shining armour, sword in hand to do battle with all manner of exotic adversaries in such films as the this one, Khaschei the Immortal (Кащей Бессмертный, 1944), Sadko (Садко, 1952), Ilya Muromets (Илья Муромец, 1956) and many others, becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most popular actors all over again. There’s not much to say about his part here, given that the script provides no real depth or shading, though greater complexity would arguably have worked against the material.
Playing the title role, Valentina Sorogozhskaya (1912-1988) has little to do but live up to its accompanying adjective, which she does pleasantly enough: given that she wasn’t a professional actress and only made one other film, it seems churlish to quibble. Irina Zarubina and Lydia Sukharevskaya are much more entertaining as the ugly (would-be) sister-in-law duo, but their prospective husbands Lev Potyomkin and Nikita Kondratyev contribute little apart from pratfalls and gurning. The real acting honours go to Georgy Millyar (1903-1993), rarely offscreen thanks to the dual role of the brothers’ father and (uncredited) the legendary witch Baba Yaga, a part he incarnated so effectively that he would repeat it in many later films.
Vassilisa the Beautiful was shot near Moscow, in Sergiev Posad, a landscape chosen because it seemed to embody an essential ‘Russianness’, festooned as it was with birch trees, mountainous landscapes and villages that had an authentically pagan air about them. Aside from one impressive sequence involving the ground Ivanushka is standing on suddenly crumbling into a shockingly deep ravine, the production values are cheerfully primitive, more reminiscent of the mechanical effects of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen some fifteen years earlier than the achievements of King Kong or The Wizard of Oz in Hollywood – the spider and three-headed serpent Gorynych are particularly clunky (even on the DVD under review, the latter’s strings are all too visible), and the three bears are much more convincing when they’re on screen by themselves (when they’re clearly real) instead of sharing it with human characters (where they’re obviously men in bear suits).
But Row and his designers counterbalance these defects with some inventive touches, such as a wooden chicken carving reacting angrily to being hit by an arrow or Ivan literally shattering the darkness with his newly-acquired sword, and there’s plenty of incidental wit, such as Belyandrasa Petrovna’s threateningly pointy hat, or the torpid bellringer being energised by the prospect of bridal fisticuffs and responding accordingly.
Some of the set-pieces are genuinely exciting, even if there’s a distinct lack of sustained peril: Ivan’s triumphs often seem merely to be a matter of hitting a stationary target at the right angle, and he’s given plenty of second chances, notably in the scene where he has to guess the answer to the spider’s riddle (it seemingly doesn’t matter if he gets it wrong first time provided he gets it right at some point in the ascent to the arachnid mandibles – which means he can offer a cute answer to the question “what is the dearest thing in the world” in the form of his beloved’s name before having a stab at the correct one: life).
Sergey Stolyarov’s son Kirill claimed that Vassilisa the Beautiful was hugely successful internationally (he also claimed it directly influenced the following year’s British fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad), but this is not supported by my own research: I trawled in vain through a decade’s worth of back issues of the Monthly Film Bulletin and Variety to find any indication of it being released in Britain or America, and it’s not mentioned in any of my reference books – even those with a generous coverage of Russian and Soviet cinema. But it’s certainly one of the earliest examples of its genre that’s easily available to the likes of us, and makes fascinating comparison with both the other Soviet films of the late 1930s and Row and Stolyarov’s later work – as well as providing an insight into what the children of the Stalin era were expected to enjoy.
- Director: Alexander Row
- Writers: Galina Vladychina, O Nechayeva, Vladimir Shveitser
- Camera: Ivan Gorchilin
- Editing: Xenia Blinova
- Design: Vladimir Yegorov
- Music: Leonid Polovinkin
- Cast: Georgy Millyar (Father/Baba Yaga), Sergei Stolyarov (Ivan), Lev Potyomkin (Agafon), Nikita Kondratyev (Anton), Valentina Sorogozhskaya (Vassilisa), Irina Zarubina (Malanya), Lydia Sukharevskaya (Belyandrasa)
Vassilisa the Beautiful is available on region-free DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in either PAL or NTSC video formats, though the NTSC is reputedly a poor-quality conversion of the PAL original. The package includes two interviews with Kirill Stolyarov on his father’s career and Russian fairytales, short biographies and filmographies of key cast and crew members, a stills gallery and trailers for other Russian fairytales. The only spoken language option is Russian, but there are subtitles in twelve other languages including English.
Links
- Internet Movie Database
- Russian Folk Art – an English version of the original folktale