Cinema: Masses into Classes

Nine Days of One Year. She’s pretty, he’s handsome. They live in an ultramodern flat. Both work. She dresses like a model, likes to make love. He’s more interested in his job. She gets moody, neglects the house, makes scenes. “You don’t love me! I’m not needed! We never see anybody!” He grunts behind his morning paper. Then one day while he’s at work she receives a visit from his best friend . . .

Sounds like Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak in nothing very much? It isn’t. It’s Aleksei Batalov and Tamara Lavrova in a fascinating new Russian film. Made in 1962, while Khrushchev was still in the Kremlin, Nine Days suggests more clearly than any previous Russian picture how far creeping liberalism has managed to advance in the last decade.

Back in the bad old days, when Russia was struggling through its basic industrial and agricultural revolution, the heroes of Soviet cinema were strapping Stakhanovites who fell in love with lathes, or strong-jawed sons of the soil who lusted after power plows. How times have changed. The hero of Nine Days is a nuclear scientist who is hopelessly hung up on a great big, beautiful neutron breeder. The Stakhanovites sweated for the sake of the socialist society. But the scientist in this picture labors, and even accepts a fatal dose of radiation, for the sweet sake of science—because, as he proclaims, “You cannot stop an idea!” Just like Greer Garson in Madame Curie.

And that’s only the beginning. What has happened to all the blathering broadsides Russian movies used to fire off at the decadent, bourgeois societies of the West? In Nine Days, the intellectual and managerial echelons of Soviet society are frankly bourgeois in character. These people look, talk, act, live in all essential respects like middle-class men and women in the nations of the West. They eat in good restaurants, tool around in streamlined automobiles, scoff at the more grandiose pretensions of the Soviet space program, gripe a little at the “administrative fools” who run the labs they work in. And pipe this. The women wear false eyelashes in bed. Karl Marx wrote an awful lot of words. It seems that now by eating them ihe Russians may get plump.