Underplayed Gems

Volga-Volga (1938)

Volga-Volga poster
Original title
Волга-Волга
Directed by
Grigori Aleksandrov
Genre
comedy film, musical film
Country
Soviet Union
Runtime
1h 46m
Rated
S
Rating
6.9 of 10 from 25 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

Amateur performers travel on a steamboat down the Volga River to compete in a talent contest in Moscow. The movie follows their adventures and mishaps along the way.

whimsicalupbeatnostalgicgood-heartedslapsticklightheartedold-fashioned

What happens

Volga-Volga (Russian: Волга-Волга) is a Soviet musical comedy directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, released on April 24, 1938. It centres on a group of amateur performers on their way to Moscow to perform in a talent contest called the Moscow Musical Olympiad. Most of the action takes place on a steamboat travelling on the Volga River. The lead roles were played by Alexandrov's wife, Lyubov Orlova, and Igor Ilyinsky. According to Orlova, the name of the film is taken from a popular Russian folk song, Stenka Razin, that Aleksandrov sang while rowing with Charlie Chaplin in San Francisco Bay. Chaplin jokingly suggested the words as a title for a movie, but Aleksandrov took it seriously and named his new film Volga-Volga. The feature was said to be Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin's favourite film. Aleksandrov claimed Stalin watched it, "so often that he could recite many of the lines from memory". Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs says that in the pre-World War II period Stalin laughed at him since he resembled a character from the film. In 1961, a new version of a movie was released, with the "Joseph Stalin" ship cut. In 2006, a colorization of the original black-and-white film began. The colorized version premiered on the Russian First Channel on February 14, 2010. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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