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
© John Pym, 2025
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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.
We are deeply favoured and honoured to publish on Calderonia the eminent film critic John Pym’s magnificent tribute to Heifitz’s film The Lady with the Little Dog, perfectly complementing Harvey Pitcher’s new translation of Chekhov’s story featured in December and January posts. Pym has entirely resuscitated my interest in the film, which I first saw in about 1968. I have just watched it twice at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8MwK0EvJ5A and am, I admit, overwhelmed. Naturally, I have understood and enjoyed far, far more in the film than nearly sixty years ago. Without exaggeration, I now find it infinitely subtle; quite possibly, even, great art. There are many new aspects that I would like to place on record in Comments, but I will confine myself in this one to asking our guest writer what, for him, is the essential difference in our reception of a black and white film from a colour one? How do the impacts differ? Is this absolutely recognised in the film world, even today? In 1960 Heifitz could have produced a colour film, like the gorgeous Soviet Anna Karenina of a few years later, but he decided not to, or his censors insisted on black and white (quite possible). Why did he choose b&w, if he did, and why might they have insisted on b&w if they did?
Black-and-white camerawork was, I suspect, as natural to the director of The Lady with the Little Dog as breathing in and out or eating his breakfast. I doubt that he was compelled to use b&w stock. It was – this element of his art, one among many – quite simply both appropriate and aesthetically satisfying. Imagine for a moment that the famous chariot race in Ben-Hur had been filmed in monochrome not Technicolor; or that the memorable, punctuating landscape shot in Heifitz’s film of a carriage slowly crossing a hillside had been captured in slightly-off greens and browns rather than in subtle tones of shaded black – neither would have been judged fit for purpose. The contrast in Ben-Hur between the teams of grey and black horses, the red and gold of the opposing chariots would have been lost. Colour accented the speed of the race, the flying sand, the spinning wheels. In The Lady with the Little Dog, in that landscape shot, all attention must be focused on the carriage, which like the lovers themselves appeared to be going precisely nowhere – and the hillside had to be a neutral, one might almost say, a disinterested backdrop. Had Heiftz shot his film in colour (expensive colour) it might have prefigured that colourised still of Iya Savvina – which is after all simply a deeply inauthentic computer-generated image.
Your response here is (obviously) deeply informed… Thank you very much indeed. In comparing the coach ride to Simferopol in Heifitz’s film with the chariot race in Ben-Hur you have, I think, chosen the perfect epitome of the differing impacts of b&w and Technicolor; their different aesthetic and intentional possibilities!
I continue to wonder what it is about b&w that seems inherently more ‘serious’. Most bibles are black, we are all brought up on black print on a white page, of course, and I knew a professional photographer who would only produce portraits of politicians in black and white (the difference between a b&w portrait of Harold Wilson and a colour one is really bewildering). Perhaps we are affected by a sense that b&w is ‘the Word’. Historical photographs tend to be sepia or black and white, of course, too. Although I entirely agree that by 1960 b&w camerawork must have been as natural to Heifitz as breathing, I cannot help feeling that the b&w of The Lady with the Little Dog also implies seriousness and historicity, and that he was well aware of that. I think it is also possible that the Soviet censors wanted to make sure the picture of prerevolutionary life (evoked with amazing natural authenticity by Heifitz and his actors) was not too glamorous, so they ordered him to use monochrome. (One must remember that it was a ‘command economy’; perhaps the slight sense of over-length and over-slowness in the film is the result of Heifitz having been allotted celluloid for a film of 90 minutes, so he simply had to use it all up — ‘fulfil the norm’.) The obligatory ‘satire’ of prerevolutionary life is in the gallery of posh, bloated and grotesque characters, very reminiscent of the Kukryniksy political cartoonists’ work, so the film does have a thick stratum of the historical criticism that was de rigueur at the time and this must have amply satisfied the censors; fortunately, these caricatures are played by brilliant old Stanislavskian actors and the core story is unaffected by them.
Incidentally, the footage of the coach hurtling round the bend, piled high with luggage and Ralph the dog, made me roar with laughter, as it looks like a cowboy film! Rather than a Wells Fargo stagecoach, I had always imagined the ‘fly’ that Anna Sergeyevna ‘hires’ as an open carriage (hence Harvey’s choice of the latter word) for just the two of them, but I must be wrong.
I would naturally welcome any more observations from you about details of the film, if you have time and inclination.
March 8, 2025: Last evening, I watched a digital transfer of a black-and-white movie, made by an expatriate German in California nearly a hundred years ago, in a packed town hall in West Kent. Accompanying this famous film, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, were two renowned musicians, a harpist, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, and a multi-instrumentalist, Stephen Horne, who had played, live, at other ‘authentic’ screenings of this movie – but never, before yesterday, together.
Sunrise is on many levels an unquestionably great and enduring film, that is to say it’s actually survived in viewing copies (as well as in a digital transfer) not just in archive preservation prints, but it’s also a deeply sentimental one with the unabashed treacly sentimentality of times past – an unnamed farmer (George O’Brien) is bewitched by a city vamp and induced by her to undertake the heartless drowning of his petite, wide-eyed wife (Janet Gaynor)… It’s a love story, told in the starkest of terms, and touched by humour, breathtaking production design and astonishing visual effects, in a very different Hollywood register from Lenfilm’s The Lady with the Little Dog: one might call it unsophisticated, certainly not by any measure ‘Chekhovian’, appealing to the heart rather than the head. But to watch it now, as I did under optimal conditions in a packed auditorium with two musicians utterly invested in the task of bringing an old silent b&w film back to life and relevance, was to have experienced something rare and unforgettable.
‘The Fleapit Cinema Club’, run entirely by volunteers, which put on the screening, concluded its programme notes on Sunrise with the following paragraph: ‘The film is precious, not least because it belongs to a lost time – it’s one of the silent era’s last hurrahs. At its close you will have forgotten – unless you have a heart of stone – the flashy allure of Woman from the City and fallen for Man, Wife and their rustic charm. Likewise, you couldn’t watch this film and wish it were made in colour. It’s perfect as it is, a monochrome fairytale.’
Indeed, but – Why did we wish it was not made in colour..? Because, perhaps, it was so entirely of itself and of its time. This b&w world was one that audiences knew and instinctively understood (in 1927; at Cannes in 1960; and even today – when we queue to buy tickets to a movie such as the Oscar-winning Roma. One does not require or expect ‘colour’ in a Dürer woodcut or when we watch Chaplin’s Tramp bowing, nervously smiling and politely lifting his black bowler hat.
Many, many thanks for reprising, Johnnie, for I know how busy you are.
How serendipitous that you had just seen a ‘live’ performance of Murnau’s b&w Sunrise! I gather from Wikipedia that it is considered one of the greatest films ever made and ‘many have called it the greatest film of the silent era’.
Obviously, the programme writer’s statement that the audience in Kent would not have wanted Sunrise made in colour because they felt it was ‘so entirely of itself and of its time’ appears to beg the question! But I do, I think, understand what is meant. Although ‘of its time’, the audience were not watching it for historical reasons — in a past time, as it were, for its window on the past — but entirely for its present human truth, its existential power now (‘entirely of itself’?) — yet the b&w gives the experience that extra perspective of time that convinces us that we are tied to those humans depicted. I feel that the depth of ‘time’ that b&w gives can enhance the ‘universal’ power of the film experience, in The Lady with the Little Dog too. It’s why I feel that modern costume in a Greek tragedy, say, or Shakespeare or Chekhov, can be impoverishing, not enriching. People are more than capable, surely, of handling the distance in time that b&w or historical costume conveys and it deepens their experience?
Just three of the things I noticed in watching Heifitz’s film again after fifty years. First, I was astonished to see that my old friend Georgii Abramovich Bialyi was the first consultant to it. Bialyi was an Academician and the greatest Soviet authority on Chekhov’s early (1880-88) short stories. It was quite possibly he, therefore, who suggested interpolating in the film the scene in a ghastly restaurant where Gurov’s colleague gets drunker and drunker, confesses that he hates his wife because she only married him for his money, and pays a waiter to grunt like a pig. This is a dramatisation of Chekhov’s 1887 story ‘The Drunks’, using some of Chekhov’s own words and a reference to another early short story by him. Second, considering that Stalin had deported the Crimean Tatars only 16 years before, it is amazing that Heifitz should dare to depict them living quite naturally and as Moslems at Yalta in his film — even introducing a beautiful scene of the Tatar coachman praying at dawn on the skyline at Oreanda. (Khrushchev had, however, denounced Stalin’s ethnic deportations in his ‘secret speech’ the year before the film.) Finally, Heifitz’s use of the burning and dripping candle as a symbol of Gurov’s and Anna Sergeevna’s passionate love would inevitably remind Russian viewers of Pasternak’s poem ‘A blizzard swept over all the land…’ with its refrain Svecha gorela na stole (‘The candle burned on the table’); this poem had been printed and made its mark by 1960, but few would know that it was actually ‘written by Doctor Zhivago’ and featured in the last chapter of the novel.