Kinoblog

Старик Хоттабыч
Lenfilm, USSR, 1956, colour, 86 mins

• Director: Gennady Kazansky
• Writers: Lazar Lagin (based on his novel)
• Camera: Muzakir Shurukov
• Design: Isaak Kaplan, Berta Manevich
• Music: Nadezhda Simonyan
• Cast: Nikolai Volkov (Hassan Abdurrahman ibn Khottab), Alexei Litvinov (Volka), Gennadi Khudyakov (Zhenya), Lev Kovalchuk (Gogha, aka ‘Pill’), Vera Romanova (Gogha’s Mother), Maya Blinova (Volka’s mother), Olga Cherkasova (Varvara Stepanovna), Yefim Kopelyan (Jafar Ali Mukhammedov), Alexander Larikov (doctor)

Though the poster implies a never-never-land extravaganza along the lines of the films of Alexanders Ptushko and Row, an impression reinforced by a cursory glance at the synopsis, with its references to genies, magic, flying carpets and exotic locations, the bulk of Old Khottabych is actually set in the time and place where it was made: Moscow circa 1956. As a result, it has an immediate historical fascination that its more fantastical cousins lack, not least thanks to a script that’s determined to ram blatant Soviet propaganda down its audience’s throat at every opportunity.

The film initially introduces us to young Volka (Alexei Litvinov), whose Young Pioneers garb (essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts) immediately labels him the embodiment of wide-eyed idealism, an impression that he does nothing to counter later on. While out swimming, he finds and retrieves an ancient bottle. Uncorking it at home, a startled Volka finds that it contains a nearly four thousand-year-old genie, ‘Old Khottabych’ (Nikolai Volkov), who in gratitude promises Volka a seemingly unlimited array of granted wishes.

So far so generic, but the film’s most inspired twist follows shortly afterwards – which is the revelation that Khottabych, far from being master of all he surveys, is in fact a doddering dullard whose views on science, technology and geography are hopelessly outdated, and his would-be generous attempt at offering Volka wealth beyond his wildest dreams is met with a curt “We’re not tsars, or capitalists, and I’d rather die than become a speculator”. In other words, he has as much to learn from Volka (and the various archetypal Soviet workers he encounters along the way) as the other way round – if not considerably more.

There is little place for magic in the thrusting technocracy of Khrushchev’s USSR, only a year away from kick-starting the space race via the launch of Sputnik. A threadbare magic carpet, initially seen flying over assorted monuments to Soviet architecture, industry and town planning, is no match for an Aeroflot plane (“How swift and convenient is this air chariot!”), and the 20th-century equivalent of the sultans of Khottabych’s youth (or first three thousand years, at any rate) turn out to be scientists, miners and engineers, whose innovations create ‘magic’ whose principles Khottabych can’t begin to grasp – an evocative shot sees him switching a small electric table lamp on and off, mystified as to how it works. Small wonder he eventually realises that his natural home is a circus.

There’s plenty of unintentional humour, not least thanks to much of Volka’s dialogue, which could have been lifted word for word from a Young Pioneers handbook. How many actual schoolboys, even from that particular society, would insist on the supremacy of the state educational and food distribution bodies over the prospect of individual gratification? Or speculate on the scientific importance of ancient gemstones over their monetary value? Or turn down the chance of surreptitiously passing an exam with a priggish “We Young Pioneers are against cheating: we fight in an organized manner”? That said, it would be churlish not to acknowledge that there’s also some genuine wit on display.

The oral geography exam where Volka is fed “facts” by Khottabych that turn out to be outdated flat-earth drivel is very funny on top of delivering its sledgehammer moral about cheating (the unsubtlety of the latter arguably adds to the entertainment value), and the football match where one team is granted an unusually co-operative goalmouth is a riot in every sense, recalling the similarly unhinged climax of the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932). The special effects, typically for a Soviet film of this vintage, are primitive, rarely rising above basic matte work and dissolves, but they serve their purpose – and of course add to the film’s already considerable kitsch quotient.

Old Khottabych has, of course, dated horribly, but that’s a major part of its charm, much like that of the explicitly socialist musicals Volga-Volga (1938), Tractor Drivers (1939) and Cossacks of the Kuban River (1946), with their scenes of synchronized wheat harvesting and songs about the joys of attaining farm production quotas. Few if any of these films were distributed on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the time of their original release and most film historians regard them with embarrassment bordering on derision – but, half a century on, films like Old Khottabych have become historical documents, not just in showing how children and families lived in the early Khrushchev era but also the kind of propaganda they were expected to swallow in the form of mass entertainment. Director Gennady Kazansky would go on to make the sci-fi romance Amphibian Man (1961), a rather more winning attempt at blending the fantastic and the didactic.

The DVD

Old Khottabych is available on DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in a package that includes a short documentary alongside the usual filmographies, stills and trailers. Spoken language options are Russian dialogue with optional English, French and Arabic voiceovers, and subtitles in thirteen languages including English. It’s available in either PAL or NTSC versions (the original encoding is PAL), and is not region-coded.
Links

• Internet Movie Database
• A complete English translation of Lazar Lagin’s original novel (courtesy of Fainna Solasko)