Love on the Two-Year Plan

Ever since movies were first produced in the Soviet Union, their main points have been lifted from the party line. "Down with bourgeois decadence!" cried the hero, and the heroine cried back, "Long live collective farms and the Five-Year Plan!" But a couple of new notes have recently crept into Soviet movies. One is love, another material success.

The long-live-love note was struck this month in Paris when the Russians showed seven of their latest and best films at three Paris theaters to celebrate Soviet Film Week. The purpose: to show Soviet film wares in a Paris showcase and put Russian movies back in the world market.

On opening night, with the French interested in a film-exchange deal, the week got an impressive official sendoff. The plush Normandie Theater on the Champs Elysees was flanked by rows of Gardes Republicans in scarlet-trimmed uniforms. The band blared the Marseillaise and the Internationale, and into the theater flocked French and Russian officials with a cluster of bejeweled Soviet film stars who were long on furs and high on necklines.

The best of the Soviet offerings was The Cicada (Mosfilm), an adaptation of a Chekhov story. It is a relentless dissection of a frivolous woman with delusions of culture, and of the effete salon riffraff that surrounded her in the days of the Czar. For the days of the commissars, the Soviets did less well, e.g., An Unfinished Novel (Lenfilm), in which all the resources of Soviet medicine fail to cure a paralyzed engineer, but when the girl doctor of his dreams rushes to his bedside in the last reel, he walks again.

A realistic desire to lift their production from about 40 movies a year to 150 in the next two years has forced Russian moviemakers to bend the party line.

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