Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’

One of Peter Strausfeld’s hand-printed linocut posters for the Academy cinema in London’s Oxford Street

Nineteen-sixty – with the first movies of the French ‘New Wave’ about to burst upon the cinemagoing world – proved a golden year for the Cannes film festival.

The jury included the leading Russian director Grigori Kozintsev and the iconoclastic American novelist Henry Miller; and in the chair was the Belgian creator of Inspector Maigret – the prolific Georges Simenon.

Twenty-nine feature films were entered in the official competition: Luis Buñuel rubbing shoulders with Vincent Minnelli; Andrzej Munk with Kon Ichikawa; Nicholas Ray with Ingmar Bergman; Jack Cardiff with Carlos Saura.

The Palme d’Or went to La Dolce Vita, a film whose reputation has never dimmed; and the award for best actress was shared by Jeanne Moreau and Melina Mercouri: the former for her performance in what would become a Sixties arthouse favourite (or for some a chin-scratcher), an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ novella Moderato Cantabile, directed by Peter Brook; and the latter for her embodiment of the ‘tart with a heart’ in the wildly popular (and borderline risqué) Never on Sunday, directed by Melina’s future husband Jules Dassin.

Antonioni’s masterpiece of alienation in sun-burnt Sicily, L’Avventura – despite the catcalls which greeted the premiere, supposedly causing its star, Monica Vitti, to flee the auditorium – was ultimately judged co-winner of the prestigious Jury Prize.

Three Soviet films – none of which, it might be said, unduly rocked the boat – were in competition that year, and all would go on to enjoy success in Europe: Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Unsent Letter, Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier, and Josef Heifitz’s The Lady with the Little Dog – the latter two sharing the somewhat opaque prize for ‘Best Participation’. Lenfilm, the state distributor, drew attention to the fact that their Chekhov adaptation was being released in the centenary of the writer’s birth.

The opening-night film – by tradition a ‘big’ picture – was William Wyler’s incomparably blockbusting Ben-Hur.

When The Lady with the Little Dog opened in Britain in the summer of 1962 its reception could not have been warmer. Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times, David Robinson of The Financial Times, Isabel Quigly of The Spectator and Penelope Houston, editor of the quarterly Sight and Sound, all rated the film ‘outstanding’.

That fastidious man of letters Francis Wyndham was among the few critics who begged to differ – judging the film merely ‘essential viewing’.

Reading Harvey Pitcher’s lucid, pitch-perfect translation of Chekhov’s story – Patrick’s Christmas gift to us all, and a sort of antidote to the present state of affairs in Russia – my mind returned to the afternoon when I first saw The Lady with the Little Dog, possibly at the Academy in Oxford Street, in London’s West End, or maybe at the Everyman in Hampstead, North London, my favourite local cinema, a short distance from the home in Well Walk to which George and Kittie Calderon moved in 1912.

I must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time: eager for experience, innocent of romance. I was captivated by the spry white Pomeranian dog trotting along the promenade at Yalta (the very spirit of life and happiness) and my heart skipped when Iya Savvina, as Anna Sergeyevna, touched her hand self-consciously to the back of her neck when the handsome, heavy-lidded Alexei Batalov, as Gurov, a seducer who seemed to have forgotten why he bothered, disinterestedly contemplated a new conquest – little knowing that he will soon, for the very first time, find himself helplessly lovestruck.

But would it stand up today, I wondered – this old black-and-white film fashioned by a veteran Soviet writer/director who had, all his professional life, beginning in the silent days of 1928, faithfully performed his prescribed duty to the Motherland? (Or would it, as Patrick Miles observed, be a counterpart to those ‘dreadful approved Soviet b&w illustrations to the story by the political caricaturists Kukryniksy…’?)

I turned to YouTube.

By 1960, with Stalin dead for seven years, Lenfilm was beginning cautiously to allow its stable of directors a degree of personal latitude. Kozintsev, for example, would make his classic (and perhaps slightly political…) Shakespearean films, Hamlet in 1964, followed by his swan song, King Lear, in 1971.

During the War, Andrei Moskvin, chief cameraman on The Lady with the Little Dog, had collaborated on both parts of Sergei Eisenstein’s epic Ivan the Terrible, a classic that was distinguished – along with much else – by some extraordinary Expressionistic effects.

Iya Savvina as Anna Sergeyevna in the original b&w film, 1960

A somewhat formal Naturalism (punctuated by moments of creaking studio work) marks the camerawork of The Lady with the Little Dog. There is, however, a striking Expressionistic flourish at the close, as two angular chiaroscuro long-shots highlight the lovers’ final parting… or is it to be truly ‘final’? (As Robert Vas remarked in his Sight and Sound review, ‘Does any Chekhov story end on a full-stop?’)

The one passage that all viewers will remember, I’d guess, is the bravura sequence, full of swooping camera movements, inside the bustling provincial theatre with its many provincial faces where Gurov pursues Anna up staircases, round corners and down corridors to find some private spot where she can open her heart and promise to visit him in Moscow. Look, the director seems to say, echoing the effect of Chekhov’s virtuoso prose passage, this is what I can do.

There are no flies on the forbidding Mme Gurov (Ala Chostakova), who is everything a complacent but wholly disillusioned wife should be; and the array of caricatured comic secondary characters add pleasing notes of levity. An inebriated clubman throws his fork on the floor, so that he can impart a secret to Gurov, and a somnolent, wholly unmoved club servant picks it up and replaces it with another without a flicker of either interest or disapproval.

Definitely not a naturalistic Russian nail-topped fence (Alexei Batalov as Gurov)

The two principals, caught in their own very different bubbles of unfulfilled unhappiness, are beautifully played. Anna, in particular, with a circle of light round the pupils of her eyes – one imagines they are pale blue Russian eyes – conveys a frantic, almost frenzied dismay at the situation she finds herself in; while Gurov, by contrast, with his slow, honeyed voice, embodies total resigned despair – but a despair not above the admiration of a dove-grey dress and the prospect of its casual, wearisome removal.

Sixty-five years on, Heifitz’s film does stand up. One leaves the film wondering deeply what will become of these two unhappy lovers who have discovered each other, and themselves, far too late in the day. Tragedy brushes their lives, and their fate touches us, too – as if with the lightest (and most deceptive) stroke of Chekhov’s pen.

But let the last word go to Robert Vas, the discerning Hungarian-born documentary-maker who found a home in England after the Rising of 1956:

This seemingly static, perhaps even academic, picture is more than ‘the best Chekhov adaptation to date’. It is a piece of pure mise en scène, and that of the best sort – the sort that works from the centre of its subject, and on that foundation constructs its visual language. Heifitz (and Chekhov) can afford to fade out at the moment when the lovers enter the bedroom – where their fashionable colleagues would probably begin the scene. He uses close-up when required by the hidden logic of the emotions, not by a sudden capricious mood of the lens. Yet this is a film ‘written with the camera’. Academic or not, it is incomparably more modern than many of its highfalutin contemporaries.

The 1960 b&w publicity still colourised by Klimbim, 2015

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.