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All Singing! All Dancing! All Marxist Musicals!
A delirious documentary that unveils a part of film history until now unknown in the West: Soviet and eastern block communist musicals.Featuring hearty peasants and workers singing and dancing their way through fields and factories, these Hollywood-style musicals interpret American escapism in socialist terms.
Most famous among Russia's 1930s musicals was Volga Volga, Stalin's favorite, which he viewed more than one-hundred times.During the '50s and '60s, the East Germans, Czechs and Romanians churned out these low-rent Jerome Robbins-esque musicals, many of which promised that consumer heaven was just a pirouette away."Who knows how things could have turned out if Socialism had just been more fun?" asks East Side Story.
Filmmakers Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn have done a superb job locating and excerpting the best moments from films never before seen in the West, such as Hard Work, Happy Holiday (GDR 1950), Vacation On The Black Sea (Romania, 1963), Tractor Drivers (USSR, 1939), My Wife Wants To Sing (GDR, 1958), Woman On The Rails (Czechoslovakia, 1965), and many more.Newsreels, commercials, outtakes from press and censorship files and appearances by the "stars," including Karen Schroder (the "Doris Day of the East") all contribute to this one-of-a-kind "That's Entertainment, Comrade."
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