Behind the scenes of the comedy "Volga-Volga": How Charlie Chaplin came up with the name of Stalin's favorite film

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

January 6 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of the famous Soviet actress, People's Artist of the USSR, mother of Andrei Mironov Maria Mironova. Her path to cinema began with a role in the famous film "Volga-Volga". This comedy became one of Stalin's most beloved films - he watched it several times and even knew the characters' lines by heart. Lyubov Orlova, who performed the main role, claimed that Charlie Chaplin himself suggested the title of the film to her husband, director Grigory Alexandrov. The audience did not know about this, as well as what terrible realities were left behind the scenes of the life-affirming comedy …

The film "Volga-Volga" became the third musical comedy by Grigory Alexandrov after the famous "Cheerful Children" and "Circus", in which his wife and muse, the famous actress Lyubov Orlova, again played the main role. All these comedies appeared in what is called the "era of false romanticism" in the 1930s, when optimistic cinema was supposed to illustrate the Stalinist slogan "Life has become better, life has become more fun." By that time, the Volga-Moscow canal was opened, which could be demonstrated in the film as one of the achievements of the young Land of the Soviets. Then, as the director Grigory Alexandrov wrote, "". Because of all these factors, after a while the film "Volga-Volga" was called propaganda, which, however, did not diminish its popularity among viewers.

In the mid-1930s. in the USSR, many creative competitions and amateur shows were held. At one of them, Grigory Alexandrov met a talented village girl, whom her superiors did not want to let go to Moscow for the competition. Then he had the idea to make a film about how two creative teams go to the capital for the amateur art Olympiad, and bureaucrats prevent them from doing so.

At first, film critics greeted the film "Volga-Volga" rather coolly. In the newspaper "Kino" in 1938 they wrote that "", in another newspaper this competition was called "". However, after the creative team working on the film was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941, the intonation of the reviews changed dramatically - dozens of publications appeared in the newspapers, in which Alexandrov's comedy was called "".

The fate of the members of the creative team testifies to how "life has become more fun" in reality. Work on the comedy took place at the height of the Great Terror. One of the scriptwriters of the film, Nikolai Erdman, shortly before the start of filming, returned from a three-year political exile and was forced to settle in Kalinin, since he was forbidden to live in big cities. Because of this, the director had to go to him to work out the script. Cameraman Vladimir Nielsen did not have time to complete the work on the film - he was arrested, accused of espionage, and after a while was shot. One of the film's directors, Zakhar Daretsky, was also arrested and exiled during filming.

For obvious reasons, the names of these people were not mentioned in the credits among the filmmakers. Actor Veniamin Smekhov in his memoirs cited a story told to him by Nikolai Erdman: "".

Maria Mironova also wrote about this: "".

After Stalin passed away, the film was edited - from it the frames with the monument to Stalin on the Moscow-Volga canal and all the inscriptions containing his name were cut out. Nevertheless, even in those days when this film began to be called agitation and state order, the comedy continued to be very popular among the general public. In many ways, the film's success was ensured by the music of Isaac Dunaevsky, who, together with the poet Lebedev-Kumach, wrote compositions that were later called songs "for all time." Despite the propaganda overtones, the Volga-Volga really charged with optimism, gave hope in difficult times and instilled confidence that our land is rich in talents.

Of course, the film owed its success to the wonderful actors, without whom it was impossible to imagine a single comedy of those years - Igor Ilyinsky, Lyubov Orlova, Vladimir Volodin, Pavel Olenev, Vsevolod Sanaev and young Maria Mironova, who played her first notable role in this film. to the cinema. True, according to her, during the editing of the picture, the episodes with her participation were minimized. Mironova assumed that the director made such a decision so that no one competed on the screen with Lyubov Orlova. Initially, her role was big, but the young actress played so brightly that sometimes she overshadowed his wife, and the prima had to be alone. As a result, the role of Maria Mironova became episodic.

Lyubov Orlova claimed that Charlie Chaplin suggested the title of this film to her husband. When Grigory Aleksandrov, during his visit to the United States, went on a boat trip along the San Francisco Bay with the legendary comedian, he decided to perform a song about Stenka Razin for his foreign colleague (“From the Island to the Rod …”). Allegedly, Chaplin really liked the line "Volga-Volga, dear mother", and he jokingly advised the director to call his next film that way. Aleksandrov liked this idea, and indeed, upon his return to the USSR, he began filming a comedy with that name.

During their trips abroad, Grigory Alexandrov and Lyubov Orlova saw the great actor more than once and maintained friendly relations with him. Charlie Chaplin often invited them to Switzerland, where he settled after leaving the United States. In one of the letters sent from Switzerland, where the director was visiting Charlie Chaplin with his wife, he wrote: "".

They say that Maria Mironova was called the iron lady, and for her son she was an indisputable authority: Why did Andrei Mironov consider his mother the main woman in his life.