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All singing! All dancing! All proletariat! Who knew the Soviets made musicals? The evidence is there in Dana Ranga's giddy documentary, which offers clips from dozens of musicals made between 1930 and 1970 from the Communist bloc. From rural Russian ditties with synchronized tractors and overall-clad farmers singing about the five-year plan to backstage melodramas and East German beach movies, this documentary reveals an entire hidden genre of Communist cinema. What makes them so fascinating is the Soviet bloc's uneasy truce with the musical, by its very nature a celebration of love and romance and plenty. How do to you turn that into a message of service and sacrifice? They tried, certainly--Stalin loved musicals--and throughout the 1930s and '40s Soviet studios created Busby Berkeley-like production numbers on assembly lines and sent field hands into song with synchronized pitchforks (no dancing allowed on the job, according to the censors) while harvesting their fields.Later musicals show more cinematic sophistication and even a winking playfulness with the genre. The clips are marvelous--some surreal, some dynamic and delirious, and some simply absurd--but to Ranga they are more than simply kitsch. Interviews with the creators and the audiences of these films reveal how much these utopian bursts of energy and joy were treasured in dreary times. Ranga creates a nostalgia for a giddy, goofy genre that this country never even knew existed. Film history has rarely been so much fun. --Sean Axmaker
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