As we approach March 2025 with our three double bills at the Bristol Megascreen connected to the use of montage, city and silent film, which includes two Soviet Classics (Man with a Movie Camera and Battleship Potemkin). Podcaster, writer and creator of A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast, Ally Pitts look at the 1934 Soviet war film Chapaev.
A much underrated film in the West and available via the Klassiki film streaming service.
We’ve all heard of toxic fandoms and whether they ruin specific films or franchises is debatable. But what about a specific individual fan, can they ruin a film? What if that specific fan is Joseph Stalin? Chapaev (1934) had its UK premiere 90 years ago this month and I’m here to make the case for it being worth your consideration in spite of its association with the Soviet dictator.
While Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin has been called out for playing fast and loose with historical events, it was certainly not exaggerating the despotic leader's fondness for movie nights, or his enjoyment of Westerns in particular. Stalin watched Chapaev a whopping 37 times in the two years following the first time it was screened for him in early November 1934. The descriptions of Stalin making various members of the Politburo watch the film again and again in Julian Graffy’s book on the film have an unnerving dark comedy to them. Although it had been over five years since The Jazz Singer heralded the dawn of the sound cinema era, outside the major cities in USSR, relatively few Soviet cinemas were set up for sound, and Stalin is on record as being unhappy that this was preventing more Soviet citizens from seeing the film.
I feel rather icky about enjoying something that Stalin clearly liked. If you share that discomfort, maybe you’ll feel better knowing that Andrei Tarkovsky was also extremely fond of it, writing in 1967: “…what a film, it’s all like a diamond with every facet contrasting with another, which is what character develops from. What grandeur! This is what a real historical film is! [...] Because the hero is a human being, and that is why he is immortal”.
Now that I’ve established that Tarkovsky’s ghost has my back, here are a few reasons why Chapaev is worth your time. Late last year the BFI ran a season called The Art of Action, which featured Chapaev’s Soviet predecessor, Battleship Potemkin. Chapaev would have been at home on the programme too as it’s an action adventure about a commander of a Red Army unit fighting in Siberia during one of the series of interlocking conflicts that followed the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, traditionally but misleadingly known as “the Russian Civil War”. I’m not claiming it’s a “Great Film” in the same league as Eisenstein’s, but it’s one that’s surprising and intriguing—not least because it was watched by a whole lot more Soviet filmgoers and TV viewers than ever saw Potemkin.
The received wisdom is that Soviet cinema in the 1920s was avant garde, ground-breaking, and awesome, and then in the 1930s Stalin and Socialist Realism ruined it all. If for argument’s sake we say that’s true, then Chapaev would be the exception that proves the rule. It’s certainly a more conventionally entertaining film than Potemkin, a film that is certainly best enjoyed on a large screen with appropriate musical accompaniment. It’s probably about as much fun as Man with a Movie Camera. However, it’s WAY more accessible than that film. Man with a Movie Camera is “arty fun”, whereas Chapaev is a genuine popcorn film.
For entertainment value, for me it’s on a par with Hitchcock films of this era like the 39 Steps or the original British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it’s worthy of mention in the same breath as King Kong or The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. Sadly, I’ve not gotten to any of the John Ford westerns of the 1930s yet, but I’d be curious to see how it stacks up against those.
As an early Soviet sound film it’s a significant milestone in development of that curious phenomenon of the “Red Western”, or “Eastern”. It has several significant silent predecessors including The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and By the Law, which are extremely different tonally, both from Chapaev, and each other, the former being a helter-skelter satire of American Westerns and the first Red Scare, set mostly in Moscow, and the latter an adaptation of a Jack London short story about greed and ruthlessness in the Yukon territory. Both were directed by Lev Kuleshov, yes, he of the famed Kuleshov Effect.
Incidentally, in connection albeit tangentially with John Ford and Westerns, I’ve spent more time and energy than I care to admit attempting to establish if Akira Kurosawa had seen Chapaev and was a fan, due similarities in its imagery and that of several of his Samurai films, and because of the Japanese master’s interest in Russian culture, which has been documented in detail by the scholar of comparative literature Olga Solovieva in The Russian Kurosawa. Kurosawa adapted works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky, and won an Oscar for Dersu Uzala, a Soviet-Japanese co-production. The most likely explanation for any similarity between his films and Chapaev is probably a convergence of similar influences. American westerns circulated widely in Soviet cinemas in the 1920s, and Kurosawa famously loved John Ford. If anyone reading this has evidence that Kurosawa watched and was a fan of Chapaev, I’d love to hear from you!
It’s not just old westerns that it resembles, though. It has an uncanny amount in common with action and adventure films of the last 50 years. Frankly, it’s tropey as heck. Its eponymous hero is a flawed, roguish maverick. Descriptors like “dashing”, “swashbuckling”, “charismatic”, and “swagger” all apply. He’s got a lot in common with a Han Solo, a James Bond, a Dirty Harry, or many iterations of Robin Hood. All those examples are quite a bit smarter than Chapaev, who was affectionately lampooned as slow-witted in a whole genre of Soviet jokes, but he shares an instinct to shoot first with many of them.
Speaking of violence, there’s a distinct stylization to many of Chapaev’s combat scenes. In one of the most memorable sequences the eponymous hero mans a mounted machine gun in a darkened room and his face is lit up by the muzzle flash as he mows down White Army hordes. You may have seen similar scenes countless times, but have you seen it in a film this old? As the Tarkovsky quotation above suggests, the film’s hero gets some character development, but the White Army officer is laughably, cartoonishly evil, and the White rank and file are, with one notable exception, always shown at a comfortably faceless distance and so the audience is not encouraged to count the human cost of victory. The comparison to some Reagan-era Hollywood action movies again draws itself. Lest I be accused of casual anti-Americanism, I’d add that the British version of The Four Feathers from the same decade as Chapaev has a similarly troubling dynamic, plus an added layer of racism.
Chapaev also has something of a “buddy cop” dynamic going on. As we’ve established, the protagonist is a brash man of action. His foil is a slightly stiff, “by the book” kind of guy, in this case he’s a commissar, so “the book” is the Communist party line. They may be chalk and cheese but over the course of the film, they develop a grudging mutual respect. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In a new movie, unless the writing and performances are particularly stand-out it would feel tired and hackneyed, but there’s a peculiar pleasure to encountering these genre staples in such an unexpected context.
Chapaev was certainly a crowd-pleaser at the time of its original release. It was reportedly seen by 30 million filmgoers in the USSR within a year of its original release. A Pravda headline declared, “The Whole Country is Watching Chapaev” and it’s easy to write off how well it did in the USSR, given the backing it had from the aforementioned moustachioed mass-murderer for one thing, and the lack of other options for another as imports of new films had been restricted in 1930. However, it did also do well in the US, including playing for 13 weeks in New York City. The New York Herald Tribune attributed its popularity with American audiences to the way it applied “the formula of the hard-riding, hard-fighting wild western melodrama of the American cinema”. It also proved to be a hit among the doomed republican side in the Spanish civil war. Josep Renau Berenguer's poster for the film is a sight to behold in itself. In the UK it received indifferent reviews, and it didn’t get a wide release until 1938 and had a much shorter run that it had Stateside. It was re-released in Britain after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 made unlikely allies of the Soviets and the British Empire.
Later in the Soviet era, the film’s success proved to be something of an albatross around the neck of LenFilm, the studio that produced it, as their subsequent films rarely proved to be popular successes. Catriona Kelly’s title for her book on the studio, Soviet Arthouse, reflects the character and appeal of many of its films and filmmakers. As the decades passed, Chapaev was promoted by the Soviet film industry as a classic. Kristin Roth-Ey details in Moscow Prime Time, her fascinating account of the media landscape of the later decades of the USSR that on its 30th anniversary 1,800 copies of a new print of the film were made. Going back to John Ford, literally “print the legend”. In this case, also distribute the shiny new print of that legend to cinemas across the country, I guess. Contrast this with the suppression by the censors of Alexander Askoldov’s The Commissar, which took a much starker and realistic approach to the violence the Communists used to win the civil war.
The re-release and promotion of Chapaev is evidence of the paradoxical “commercial” imperatives of the Soviet film industry. The industry was meant to finance itself and generate revenue for the state to reinvest elsewhere in the economy. Therefore, cinema officials were as keen to get bums on seats as their western capitalist counterparts. Roth-Ey describes how this populist approach to cinema programming was referred to as “the Bridget Bardot technique”, owing to the large number of ticket sales that Soviet cinemas had achieved by booking films starring the French sex symbol. In this context, Chapaev was both a dependable money-maker and ideologically “sound”.
Slightly later on it had an “always on the telly” status akin to that which The Great Escape, Casablanca or the older Bond films had in the UK when I was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s. I’m tempted to describe it as a state-sanctioned comfort watch. While I wouldn’t exactly call it a guilty pleasure but with its tacit approval of state-sanctioned violence, it’s hardly an innocent one either. But then again, that’s another thing it has in common with James Bond and Dirty Harry.
If you’re interested in giving it a watch, it’s on the streaming service Klassiki, which is available in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and the US and also features The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, with a wonderful specially commissioned score by Juliet Merchant. The Commissar is on there as well, as are several LenFilm films.
I’ve already mentioned several books in this article, but another one that deserves a mention is Maria Belodubrovskaya’s Not According to Plan: Filmmaking Under Stalin.
I’m indebted to the Czech-Canadian film-maker and podcaster Martin Kessler for originally bringing this film to my attention.
If you’re interested in Red Westerns/Easterns, Allan, a Film Studies graduate and trade unionist based in Glasgow has a YouTube video on the subject that’s well worth a watch.
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