Aulic Exclusiva

This film re-creates the historical setting of the 1860s brilliantly, then spoils it all with an Eisensteinian-expressionistic style of acting and photography that gives one the giggles with its melodramatic jerkiness. Worst of all is Rodion Shchedrin's shrill, strident score. It would be too loud and insistent for an axe murder in an insane asylum; in a drawing room from the reign of Alexander II it sounds simply ludicrous and irritating.

Vasili Lanovoy is handsome and romantic-looking as Count Aleksey Vronsky—his stiff bearing probably correct stylistically, his costumes wonderful. He does love to stare and lurch in that "I-am-Ivan-the-Terrible's-kid-brother" manner of Soviet film. His hair piece is not very good, either.

Lanovoy does at least very much look his part, which is more than can be said of the woman playing Anna Karenina. She looks a lot more like Anna Magnani, complete with black moustache. Mme Karenin is supposed to be an extraordinary aristocratic beauty, a being from the highest society. Here she looks like she has strayed from a film by Pietro Germi. The actress likes bombastic reactions right out of Mexican television drama, which the camera captures with Shchedrinesque careenings.

That great acting was possible, even in this school of film, is witnessed to by the master player of the role of Aleksey Karenin, Nikolai Gritsenko (1912–1979). He is quite unforgettable and detailed; he helps one understand Tolstoy better.

Most of the film is the other way around: one would hardly understand anything if one had not previously read the novel. The abrupt and disconcerting editing doesn't help.

No film could ever hope to do justice to such a literary masterpiece, but Clarence Brown's 1935 version is incomparably more satisfactory. Too bad. This could have been wonderful.

A documentary, between humorous and quizzical, on what it was like to grow up as the child of clandestine Spanish Reds in the Franco era, complete with cloak-and-dagger comings and goings on false passports, complaining, from said Reds, on what life in Bucharest was like, (when they had dedicated their existence to giving Spain precisely something like the Ceauşescu régime, though they themselves spent a lot of time in Paris), and the strangeness of having one's young life completely dominated by a weird, inhuman ideology that had no connection to anything one wanted or felt. And yet one knew nothing else.

The whole General Staff of then-alive Spanish communists is interviewed on-screen, one more bizarre than the other, yet completely un-selfconscious.

Never mind the semi-literate socio-balderdash posted below, by someone who is obviously not, shall we say, musically minded. This film is merely a screen adaptation of the zarzuela La verbena de la paloma ['The Carnival of the Dove'], composed in 1893 by Tomás Bretón (1850-1923), to a libretto by Ruperto de la Vega. A zarzuela is a Spanish form of operetta, and this piece is one of the most successful and beloved examples of the genre. As the dates above indicate, this very popular piece has nothing to do with whatever "régime" was governing Spain in 1963. Indeed, this was part of a whole series of filmed classic zarzuelas produced by Spanish State television in the 1960s, all selected for their popularity and long success with the public.

The production is lavish and beautifully illustrative of traditional zarzuela stagings, filled with nostalgic charm, except for the brilliant twist ending which is equally endearing 45 years later. Of course some of the colloquial humour sounds definitely "period": this theatre piece is 115 years old, and all the more enchanting for that. It evokes a whole bygone era of life in Madrid, pokes gentle fun a several foibles of that time, and rattles with some of the most wonderful music ever composed by a Spaniard. All the tunes of this zarzuela are known and beloved over the whole Spanish-speaking world, except perhaps by the latest rapper generation.

The cast is superb in its command of the idiom and style of the piece, especially the two veterans in charge of the comic parts, Milagros Leal as battleax 'Aunt Antonia' and the immortal Miguel Ligero in one of his unforgettable rôles, the cowardly 'Don Hilarión', dirty old man extraordinaire. His solo as he primps himself up to go out with the young girl is one of the great moments in filmed musical theatre.

This is a life-enhancing version of this beloved chestnut, recommended to all who love vocal music and sung musical theatre.