Lieutenant Kizhe, a.k.a. The Czar Wants to Sleep (Belgoskino, Amkino, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Not long ago I played through a YouTube post of the Lieutenant Kijé suite by Sergei Prokofieff (his last name is usually spelled “Prokofiev”, but “Prokofieff” is how he spelled it himself during the 12 years, 1920 to 1932, in which he lived in countries that use the Roman alphabet), which led me to dig up my comments on the actual movie, Lieutenant Kizhe, for which Prokofieff wrote the music. My husband Charles and I watched the movie together in 2008 and it’s an unjustly and unfairly neglected movie that deserves to be better known. Here’s what I wrote about it back then:

The movie from this disc my husband Charles and I watched last night was Lieutenant Kizhe, a 1934 Soviet-era Russian movie that’s known today, if at all, only for the fact that Sergei Prokofieff composed the music for it and assembled his score into a five-movement suite (usually called Lieutenant Kijé) that’s become a much-recorded (arkivmusic.com lists 42 versions) classical standard. The film is based on one of those premises that seem to be the specialty of Slavic authors (Franz Kafka comes to mind, as also does Nikolai Gogol): a satire of the absurdity of bureaucracy and the idea that whatever is written in the official records, no matter how wrong or crazy it is, reality must be adjusted to conform to it. The story (based on a novel by Yuri Tynyanov, who also wrote the script for the film) takes place in 1800, when Russia was ruled by the mad Czar Paul I, Catherine the Great’s son. It opens in the palace, as Paul is trying to sleep (an offscreen chorus sings, “The Czar Is Asleep,” repeatedly), only to be wakened by someone calling out, “Guard!” “Who called ‘Guard?’” screams the awakened Czar, threatening to send the culprit to Siberia and make him march there with no shoes on. At the same time an overworked scribe in the palace copying a list of the officers in the Czar’s guard regiment makes a mistake and writes the ending of the Russian word for “lieutenant” twice, thereby creating a fictitious “Lieutenant Kizhe” — and the list makes its way up the chain of command until someone in the upper echelons hits on the idea of getting everybody else off the Czar’s hook by saying that it was Lieutenant Kizhe who called “Guard!” and thereby woke the Czar up. Kizhe is accordingly arrested and marched to a prison camp in Siberia, after first being whipped with 100 lashes — when the menials who are supposed to be doing all this ask why they’re doing this to someone who doesn’t exist, they’re assured, “He’s a confidential prisoner. He has no shape.”

Further complications ensue when Paul decides to pardon Kizhe and bring him back to court, then promotes him to colonel (the subtitles mistakenly use the term “corporal” instead of “colonel,” and at first I wondered if “corporal” were a far higher rank in the Czarist Russian army than in any other and it was only after the film was over that I realized what went wrong), finally to general, and then puts him in charge of the entire Russian army — all without anyone in court actually having laid eyes on him (when Paul or anyone else actually summons Kizhe they’re always put off with excuses — he’s having dinner, he’s not feeling well, he’s still asleep, etc.). Paul even orders one of the women at court (Nina Shaternikova) to marry Kizhe (she thinks he’s already made a pass at her, obviously confusing him with some other man who actually had!), and the attempt to pull off a wedding ceremony with only one of the participants physically present is one of the most hilarious sequences of this incredibly funny (in a bitter, black-humorous way) movie. Eventually the people in the Czar’s court, realizing the only way they’re going to be able to get rid of Kizhe once and for all is to kill him off, take him to a doctor’s office (where the doctor attempts to examine a nonexistent patient with an enormous syringe and Kizhe’s “death” is indicated when one of the boots, placed on the stretcher to give the illusion that there’s a body on it, falls off and hits the floor) — only in the meantime the 10,000 rubles Czar Paul gave Kizhe to set up his household after his marriage has disappeared (the officer in charge of all this has stolen it) and the furious Czar bucks him all the way down the ranks and insists that Kizhe’s elaborate state funeral (where they’re bearing a bier without a visible body on it) be cancelled and he be given the simple burial of a common private.

Lieutenant Kizhe is one of the most audacious films ever made, both thematically and stylistically. Indeed, the most amazing thing about it is that it was made at all as late as 1934, well after Stalin had taken complete control of the Soviet government and started imposing his standard of “socialist realism” on all Soviet art. Director Aleksandr Fajntsimmer made Kizhe as if it were still the 1920’s, carrying forward the stylistic experiments of Eisenstein and the other great Soviet directors of the silent era; his film begins with prismatic shots of guardsmen marching (as Charles noted, the guardsmen must have been a real regiment because they marched far too precisely to be movie extras) that expand to fill the screen. The sets look like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari meets The Scarlet Empress, and the acting is stylized throughout — especially Mikhail Yanshin’s performance as Czar Paul, which looks like he’d seen Emil Jannings’ now-lost The Patriot, in which Jannings also played Czar Paul, and copied the performance. I also got the impression Orson Welles must have seen this film when it was relatively new, since there are at least two scenes Welles later copied: the sight of a character passing a giant mirror in the palace and an exciting sleigh ride through a darkened wood (recycled in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, respectively). The audacity of the direction and its heavy-duty formalism has its echo in the story itself; just about any other filmmakers anywhere else would have had some lower-class tramp stumble into the action and get himself passed off as Kizhe (the way Danny Kaye poses as the titular Inspector General in his 1949 Gogol-derived classic, or Cary Grant ends up mistaken for a nonexistent international spy in North by Northwest), but Fajntsimmer and Tynyanov made the much harder decision to keep Kizhe totally fictitious and build the comedy mostly around their attempts to maintain the illusion that Kizhe exists (an interesting variation on the central premise of The Emperor’s New Clothes).

What’s even more astonishing about this movie is that its central premise is that Russia is being ruled by an insane megalomaniac whose every word is law and who regularly threatens to ship off his enemies, real or imagined, to horrible prison camps — creating a perpetual climate of fear in his own court as everybody in it wonders if he or she could be next to go — and though the filmmakers give it the thin historical veiling of insisting in titles at both the beginning and the end that this is set in 1800, the portrait of “Czar Paul” tallies so closely with everything we know about Stalin it’s utterly amazing that the filmmakers escaped the gulag themselves and their film not only got made (with the cooperation of the Soviet Army and a big enough production budget to do those splendiferous, stylized sets) but was actually released both in Russia and abroad. (I checked imdb.com to see if either Fajntsimmer or Tynyanov were actually gulag victims; Fajntsimmer wasn’t — he directed sporadically until 1979 and died in 1982 — and Tynyanov died in 1943 after having been involved in a literary group called “The Serapion Brothers” with Yevgeny Zamiatin, author of We, the first 20th century dystopian novel and an obvious influence on both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.) Incidentally, the print we were watching had English subtitles, but they were printed so low on the screen that some were difficult or almost impossible to read; fortunately, this was not a dialogue-driven film so we had no problem following it anyway — and, oddly, the recording quality on Prokofieff’s score (played by the Leningrad Philharmonic with Isaak Dunayevsky as conductor) actually seemed better than the sound of Prokofieff’s score on the original track for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, made four years later.