Sunday, July 13, 2014


Movie Review

The Blue Bird (1976)

May 14, 1976

Screen: Cukor's U.S.-Soviet 'Blue Bird'

Published: May 14, 1976

TECHNICALLY "The Blue Bird," the new screen version of Maurice Maeterlinck's old, numbingly high-minded fairy-tale parable, is an American-Soviet co-production—the first—a single film made by the pooling of American and Soviet talents.

The movie was produced entirely in the Soviet Union, mostly in Leningrad and environs, under the direction of an American (George Cukor), with American and English actors (Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Cicely Tyson, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews), with Soviet performers (Oleg Popov, Nadejda Pavlova, members of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet Company), with one English cameraman and one Soviet, and with dozens of Soviet technicians.

What is being shown at Radio City Music Hall, where "The Blue Bird" opened yesterday, is one movie. Yet as you watch it you keep seeing two films that want to compete but don't, everyone being polite, accepting compromise, effectively neutered.


Though the film has about it a kind of lumbering tackiness that I associate with Soviet stage spectacle, I suspect that the Russian version of this co-production might be a lot more interesting than ours. For one thing, Russian audiences apparently love "The Blue Bird," the chef d'oeuvre of the Belgian-born playwright who allowed Stanislavsky to stage the world premiere at the Moscow Art Theater in 1908. This love and familiarity with the work might possibly have inspired Soviet film makers to bring to it a consistency of character and style, as well as a decisive point of view, completely absent from the hyphenated production we have here.

Spectacle for spectacle's sake no longer is the rage in this country. It can still work sometimes if it's put on a large patch of ice, but the romantic notions that motivate "The Blue Bird" are enough to send most American children, to say nothing of the ancients who may accompany them to the film, into antisocial states beginning with catatonia and ending in armed rebellion.

"The Blue Bird" is the story of Tyltyi and Myltyi, two poor peasant children who are instructed by the Queen of Light to seek the Blue Bird of Happiness. To help them on their quest. Light gives the kids a hat decorated with a magic diamond that permits them to call forth the souls of all things, animate and inanimate. Thus Tyltyi and Myltyi set off on their journey accompanied not only by Light (Miss Taylor in head-to-foot stage jewels) but by people representing Bread, Milk, Water, Sugar, Fire, Cat and Dog.

At this point I'm afraid that I'm going to have to give away the ending of the film: before the children learn that the Blue Bird of Happiness is in their own backyard, they visit the kingdom of the past and the future, and the queendoms of night and luxury, at each stop learning some bit of wisdom. The film is not very old before you're longing to see a nice, self-absorbed Munchkin who wouldn't know an aphorism from a spitball.

Mr. Cukor, a director of wit and immense verve ("Holiday," "Pat and Mike," the Judy Garland "A Star Is Born") seems to have had less chance to direct in this case than to act as the goodwill ambassador who got his actors on and off the sets on time.

The English-language screenplay, by Hugh Whitemore and Alfred Hayes, would tax the inspirations of anyone. What could Mr. Cukor possibly have suggested to Miss Taylor to help her read a line like, "I am the light that makes men see/The radiance in reality"? Keep a straight face, perhaps. The actress has some creditably funny moments as a witch and some not-so-good as a peasant mother who darns socks.

None of the English-speaking actors can do much but behave as if he was in a very unlikely pageant. This includes Miss Gardner (Luxury), Miss Fonda (Night), George Cole (Dog) and Cicely Tyson (Cat). However, the two children—Todd Lookinland as the boy and Patsy Kensit as the girl—are quite charming in situations that make the adults look ridiculous.

The Soviet cast members, who speak in badly dubbed English, are no better except when they are given a chance to dance. Nadejda Pavlova is briefly, truly radiant in a tiny snippet from a ballet in which she dances the Blue Bird, but we see a lot less of it than I'm sure the Soviet audiences will. Members of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet are also featured in other dances, all of which appear to have been abbreviated for our consumption.

We are also given several dreadful, Disney-esque songs, including one stunner called (I think) "The Blue Halloo."

Why the film suffers from so many technical problems, I have no idea. The color quality of the footage involving the major characters often doesn't match the material shot, I assume, by the Russian cinematographer. Then there are all those blue birds we see from time to time. Some look like black birds and some are simply pigeons dyed blue.

No New Yorker in his right mind would cross a street to look for a pigeon.

Loading Reader Ratings