Cinematheque: Red Hollywood, The Musicals of Grigori Alexandrov and Lubov Orlova

This is it: Stalin’s favorite film. And about this film, anyway, he was right -- though it was made at the height of Stalinist repression, it easily ranks among the best musicals of all time. Buoyant Orlova plays alongside Soviet star Igor Ilinsky (a Meyerhold veteran) in a race up the Volga River to teach high-minded bureaucrats a little something about the people’s theater. Russia, 1938, 35mm, b/w, 106 min., subtitled.