Stormy Applause

Rostislav Dubinsky (1923-1997) was the first violinist, musical director, and a founding member of the Borodin Quartet. The group was one of the few leading lights of Soviet classical music - named, like all the others, by the government and forcibly whittled down to only one full-blooded Jewish member (Dubinsky) before it became a success, but nonetheless talented enough that it toured abroad, both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Dubinsky defected in 1975, and in 1989 published his lamentably out-of-print memoirs, Stormy Applause. The book is a marvel. Dubinsky's English education only began in 1955, yet in the ensuing 44 years he accrued sufficient mastery of the language to write an entire book in charming prose that rarely, if ever, suggests that the author might be a non-native speaker.

Dubinsky's portrait of life under a totalitarian regime is a harrowing one. Certainly, the preconceptions held in the free world regarding Soviet power structure are shown to be true - and the book is a pointed rejoinder to anyone who would suggest that life in the United States, whatever its shortcomings, is not free. Dubinsky provides numerous accounts of the suffering inflicted upon those designated enemies of the state (no matter how arbitrarily), from a vocal Jewish actor who was run down by a government truck and whose entire family was sent to the Gulag, to a Canadian socialism enthusiast who immigrated to the USSR following the Revolution, only to be arrested with his family and shot as a Western spy during the Great Purge. A daughter of the latter man, Olya, was released following Stalin's death and met Dubinsky in Moscow, soon teaching him English and assuming an overarching importance in his life; years of malnutrition suffered in prison left her frail and underdeveloped, however, and she shortly passed away while he was on tour in Siberia. The threat of governmental brutality hung over every aspect of Soviet life, and those who didn't follow the party line were severely punished. For instance, after violinist David Oistrakh refused to sign a letter denying that Israel was a true homeland for Soviet Jewry, agents ransacked his apartment and stole only the least valuable and most  irreplaceable of his personal artifacts. Word of threats like these traveled fast, and was enough to keep the vast majority of public figures in line.

Yet Stormy Applause isn't the story of a political regime that "corrodes people the way rust eats into iron," so much as one of those people who lived under it. Inevitably, the paranoiac pressures enforced from above took their toll on all Soviet citizenry, leading to a world in which in addition to one's affairs being in order, one's neighbors' affairs also had to be bad, for the sake of "complete happiness." Following in a grand Russian tradition, the strains of day-to-day living were magnified for Jews, for whom anti-Semitism was so much a fact of life that its manifestations had an astoundingly casual air about them. In the midst of an internal passport check - an inconvenience by no means restricted to Jews alone - policemen would regularly pause at the "Nationality" line (decided by the government) and offer "curious expressions, as if they were wondering, What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" Even among the more socially progressive friends a Jew could make in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood it would only be a matter of time - or in the case of Dubinsky's musician friend Andrei Gorbatov, one heated game of chess - before "strangle [the king]" became "Strangle the Jews."

The emotional release of Stormy Applause comes in the form of music. Dubinsky spent twenty-nine years in the Borodin Quartet, encompassing 3000 concerts, dozens of hours rehearsing for each one spent performing, and very nearly as much time grappling with Soviet bureaucracy over which music he would be allowed to play in public. For composers were subject to the same governmental whims as ordinary citizens, and could, at any time and for any reason, find themselves classified among the Untouchables. Certainly, foreign composers (and especially modern ones) were perennially on thin ice, and such names as "Schönberg, Bern, and Webern were unmentionable words." The stakes were much higher, however, for Soviet composers, for whom official condemnation engendered devastating personal consequences. Dubinsky renders the terror of this kind of life particularly vividly in recounting the life of legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he knew personally. Though Shostakovich twice survived ideologically-oriented "civil executions," Dubinsky noted that the "expectation of violent death... became the main theme in [his] music and was stamped forever on his face." Viewed in context, Shostakovich's music was not merely a scathing criticism of totalitarianism, but a very specific outcry against the effects of the Soviet Union on the minds of its citizens - "the destruction of Russian thought and culture, their gradual ruin, which Stalin began and Hitler only wanted to complete." For Dubinsky, to perform Shostakovich was to "[unmask] evil and hypocrisy," to "risk your life for the truth." In writing about his performances, Dubinsky manages to voice these eternal truths as movingly as the composer whose work he so admired. One performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet (a Borodin studio recording of which can be heard below) proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life:

When we sat down, we began playing at once, as if it were the most natural act in the world. We performed the Borodin Quartet No. 2 in D-major, with the unrestrained music-making it required. In Shostakovich's fourth quartet we didn't hold back our emotions. It was surprising that our conversation [with a chauffeur, Helmut, about what took place in concentration camps] had taken place today, because Shostakovich's music was about that very subject - the so-called right of some people to destroy others. With Helmut we had spoken about Hitler's Germany, but now we were playing a piece about Stalin's Russia. By allowing Shostakovich's music to be played, the Soviet authorities had significantly complicated their lives, because the truth about the Soviet regime, concealed so carefully, began to reach the hearts of people all over the world. Judging by the silent hall, it was clear that his tale about twentieth-century tyranny was heard and understood. We ended the concert with Schubert, who, after the Shostakovich, acquired a special philosophical depth: as if regimes and rulers may come and go but another life, pure and elevated, remains undamaged. 

Ailing Cleveland

In 1893, Grover Cleveland - the US President commonly remembered as little more than the only Commander in Chief to serve two terms that weren't consecutive - disappeared for five days, having boarded a friend's yacht and not returned to shore. Though his term coincided with a burgeoning era of American journalism (in volume, if not universally in accuracy), standards being as they were at the time, his prolonged absence wasn't considered terribly unusual, and the official excuse of a leisurely fishing expedition marked by the extraction of a bad tooth was taken at face value. In fact, Cleveland was aboard that yacht for a then-pioneering surgery to remove a cancerous growth from the roof of his mouth. It had been decided that the surgery had to take place in secret to preserve national faith in the recently-reelected Cleveland - and by extension, the economy, which was faltering under the weight of railroad bankruptcies and a crisis over the question of a Silver Standard. (Oral cancer was a particularly touchy subject for the contemporary American public as it had recently killed Ulysses S. Grant, following an extended battle that had been covered with morbid curiosity in all the country's newspapers.) The story was broken by a single reporter, E.J. Edwards, who would face lasting repercussions for his journalistic daring.

This story is covered in The President is a Sick Man, an outstanding book by Matthew Algeo. The narrative is written in a compulsively entertaining fashion, making for presumably the most entertaining history yet written of an otherwise forgotten President. The book also does an excellent job of providing a succinct, detailed explanation of factors that contributed to the cover-up - Grant's death, and especially the Free Silver movement - and the evolution of modern medicine. The latter is particularly appropriate, given not only the stature of the patient, but the extremely complicated nature of the surgery itself. Despite being only a handful of years removed from the advent of antiseptic surgery, the skilled medical team managed to leave a wound that healed quickly even by modern standards, and to craft an adequate prosthesis to leave Cleveland's speech and appearance (relatively) unchanged by the radical alteration in the shape of his mouth. Cleveland's cancer was also never known to recur: certainly, it never reappeared in his mouth, and though he was too fat to check for certain using the diagnostic tools of the age, his eventual death (15 years later!) was not suspected to be related to cancer metastasized from his mouth. Of course, this alone led interested doctors to question for years the nature of his tumor. The questions were finally answered in March 1980, when studies on the preserved remains of the tumor were published in Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Cleveland was found to have had verrucous carcinoma, a comparatively benign cancer that rarely metastasizes, but one that would have restricted his eating and breathing if left untended. The doctors were thus posthumously found to have been precisely right in their choice of treatment - a fitting cap to an already remarkable feat. The study itself, published by John Brooks, Horatio Enterline, and Gonzalo Aponte, is incredibly difficult to track down, online or otherwise. When I wrote to ask him if he knew where I could find a copy, Mr. Algeo was kind enough to scan all 26 pages and email them to me. On the off-chance that anyone else on the internet was looking, and with any luck to save him the trouble of sending them again, the article can be downloaded here.

Out of Print Gems: "Chimes at Midnight"

Past posts have dealt with Orson Welles, and they, like most stories about him, have concerned a decline in luck and resources that, unusually for Hollywood, was not precipitated or accompanied by a decline in talent. They've also noted that by a combination of curious disinterest and copyright disputes, many of his films have been released on home video only on VHS - or in some cases, never at all.

Chimes at Midnight (also called Falstaff) falls somewhere in between. The film has been sporadically released by different companies, often at a dearth of expense that (intentionally or not) mirrors the making of the film itself. "Official" DVD copies are available in Spain, and nowhere else. Unsurprisingly, the prints of Chimes that do circulate are often pretty shoddy, further complicating the already muddy original audio, recorded four and a half decades ago on substandard equipment. Yet the film is truly outstanding. Welles' enormous familiarity with Shakespeare allowed him to condense five Shakespeare plays - Henry IV Pts. 1 & 2, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor - into a perfectly coherent narrative with minimal added dialogue. His enormous corpus make him an even better Falstaff than he was an Othello; his naturally resonant laugh rings true to the larger-than-life lovability of the character, and his formidable acting chops really bring out a usually underemphasized sadness that makes his hard breaks all the more touching. Direction is carried out with the flair you can almost come to take for granted in his work: deep focus as characters listen in on what would otherwise have been soliloquies; seemingly cavernous palatial sets that given the budget, in reality, couldn't have been; and a similarly miraculously choreographed battle scene, making the Battle of Shrewsbury out of a handful of extras and expertly contrasting the hilarious sight of a walrus-sized man crammed into a suit of armor with shots that suggest how awful the battle must really have been. Greed and inertia may see to it that Chimes at Midnight never sees the release it deserves, but thanks to the glory of the internet, at least can never be lost. Interested parties can download the film here.

[EDIT 8/30/2016: Against nearly impossible odds, the best case scenario has played out, and the Criterion Collection has been granted access to the best of all existing elements and allowed to remaster the film to their peerless standard. Chimes at Midnight was at long last released today for the first time on American home video (and the download link consequently disabled). It's a landmark day for film.]

VHS of the Month: "The Magnificent Ambersons"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Following Citizen Kane - a movie whose lavish acclaim has mostly been applied in retrospect, and whose controversy and unprofitability in 1941 destroyed its creator's career - Orson Welles directed 10 films whose production and distribution reflected Hollywood's distrust in him. The saddest casualty of this neglect was Kane's immediate successor, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's familial saga The Magnificent Ambersons. As originally made, the film was nearly 2½ hours long; however, after a few unenthusiastic screenings it was slashed by studio executives at RKO while Welles was directing a wartime documentary in South America. The resulting film runs a full hour shorter and features a happier ending to the story than Welles had intended. To make matters worse, the excised footage was burned by RKO (possibly to prevent Welles from tampering), thus dashing any chance of future reconstruction.

Yet the film that remains, like so many of the under-financed projects Welles would undertake in his later career, is nonetheless a remarkable piece of work. The deep focus and dramatic camera technique which had been so shocking in Kane were, if anything, even more fluid and confident in Ambersons, and Welles' inimitable touch leaves its mark on every scene (even the end credits are memorable!). The film presents Tarkington's story - which chronicles the decline and collapse of a Southern family after years of unchallenged prominence in its community - in suitably sweeping fashion, and contrasts the decline of the Ambersons with the rise of the automobile in a particularly moving fashion. Ambersons also features great performances from Kane/Mercury Theater holdovers Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, the latter of whom in particular is every bit as impressive as the spinster Fanny as she was in her extremely brief role as Charlie Kane's mother. Like far too much of Welles' filmography, factors including estate disputes have kept Ambersons from ever having been released on DVD; in fact, the most recent VHS was a Turner Classic Movies release in 1996 that was essentially the version they'd show on TV (including the TCM intro segment). Even chopped up and hard-to-find, though, Ambersons is still simply one of the best movies made by perhaps the greatest of all American directors.

[UPDATE: Spurred exclusively by my recent mention of the film, Warner Brothers has announced a pending DVD release of Ambersons - unadorned, but remastered and on DVD nonetheless. Coincidentally, the release also coincides with the BluRay release of Citizen Kane and the 70th anniversary of that landmark.  -5/20/11]

Voodoo Macbeth

In 1936, 20-year-old Orson Welles staged a production of Macbeth in Harlem starring an all-black cast, composed largely of non-professional actors. Carried out under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (one of the many bureaus of the WPA established by FDR to jumpstart the American economy during the Great Depression), the play kept the basic plot and dialogue of the original intact, but transposed the action to a fictitious Caribbean island modeled on Haiti and changed the witches to voodoo practitioners. The resulting "Voodoo Macbeth" was something of a historical milestone: against all odds, it was an enormous commercial success, and it marked one of the first instances in American theater of a serious production starring black actors that was respected and sustained by white audiences. The play would go on tour, and the publicity would be a major factor in Welles' rise to fame. (He would go on to direct and star in a more traditional - if typically idiosyncratic - film adaptation in 1948.)

Unfortunately, not much of Voodoo Macbeth remains. The bulk of the production is detailed only in Welles' annotated promptbook, which gives an outline of the structure of the play; contemporary reviews also preserve something of the character of the show. Luckily, the last 4 minutes of the play were preserved in a WPA film called We Work Again, which documented the bureau's efforts to provide black Americans with work during the 30s. It's a priceless glimpse into a small but sadly overlooked event in the history of American entertainment. You can see those four minutes below, or download We Work Again for free courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Out of Print Gems: Orson Welles' "Julius Caesar"

Orson Welles enjoyed an ascent to fame that befitted his monumental talent. Soon after his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast of Halloween 1938, he signed a movie contract that gave him total control over films he would make for RKO; he immediately proceeded to make Citizen Kane, commonly named the greatest movie ever made. Even before then, though, Welles had already established himself as a rising star of both theater and radio - arenas he would combine with his Mercury Theater on the Air.

Welles' first work with the Mercury Theater (as a stage company) was a controversial but well-received production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which he transposed into contemporary, fascist Italy. In July 1938, Welles and his company recorded a comparatively traditional version of the play for Columbia's "Entré" division, edited only for time. Welles' familiarity with Shakespeare is evident throughout his body of work - he adapted both Macbeth and Othello and based Chimes at Midnight on five of his plays - and it shows in his reduction of Julius Caesar to its essence, leaving a version that really excites and lasts exactly an hour and a half. Welles himself narrates stage directions and plays Cassius; his inimitable voice and typically dynamic performance superbly complement those of the rest of the Mercury cast, who are every bit as great here as in Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons. It's a worthy interpretation of one of Shakespeare's great political tragedies and a wonderful, overlooked highlight of Welles' remarkable career.

Interested parties can download the recording here. [Contact me if you would like to access the file but the link doesn't work.]