It might seem strange to start talking about the European musical – the most gentle genre – by referring to the most notorious images of hate and evil. But no musical could be more stylized or more dominated by march-like aggressiveness than three perversely professional compilations: Feldzug in Poland (Fritz Hippler, 1940), Feuertaufe (Hans Bertram, 1940) and Sieg im Westen (Sven Noldan, 1941), which cover the spectacle of the fall of several countries in a row: Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, France.

These films, designed to frighten the enemy and to show that any resistence would be stupid, were organic contradictions: nominally they were documentaries and news material, but they were obviously as fictional as a musical could be, striving for symphonic, operatic dimensions, hypnotically hammering out the names and places of the rewritten map of Europe with a sciencefiction-like sense that everything had been reborn because of the great future that lay ahead of the United Europe. (…)

What is impressive about wartime musicals (and sets them apart from musicals of other periods) is their graphic frankness that covers an extraordinary amount of territory that is probably beyond the reach of what a ’documentary’ could achieve. Thus for instance Hollywood, at the threshold of the musical’s greatest period (MGM and the Freed Unit), produced many very strange birds, from the secrets of the soul (Lady in the Dark, Mitchell Leisen’s 1944 masterpiece) to the foreign politics of The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, 1943). The idea and the outrageous reality of the term ’banana republics’ could not be expressed more blatantly than in the choreography of Berkeley’s film, fusing together images of Latin America where a benign haughtiness camouflages a hard fist and Latin Americans as childlike freaks à la Carmen Miranda with her Tutti Frutti hat. (The love interest in these films always involves the ’real’ people, the North Americans).

This masterpiece of grotesque joy could easily mark the limits of the musical. Not so. The limits of the genre, inherently unrealistic, were stretched to an even wilder degree by Ivan Pyr’ev’s film come V šest’ časov večera posle vojny (Six Hours after the Liberation – 1944). The twisted bodies of the battlefield, the deaths, the destruction and the psychosis caused by total war are thrown right before our eyes, in a stylized, graphic, graceless state, and in images that bear a tragic and almost cosmic power. The hero returns from the front as an invalid who has lost his leg. His smile is untainted, but he is timid and withdrawn, and he wants his girlfriend to think he has died. ”Look Vanja”, he says to his friend, ”I don’t dance any more.” (…)

This ”musical and poetic” phantasy was made well before the end of the war, at a moment when ’liberation’ still had a utopian ring to it. Hollywood is beaten with its own weapons here. Almost as if obeying the international rule book of fundamental scenes, we see again a woman at a huge piano, with children as the chorus and Stalin in the background: the full repertory of themes sculpted in the popular imagery that freely integrates all the influences and styles the world could then provide, and makes them work. The reappearance of youth untarnished and unharmed by the war’s destruction becomes palpably true and likely. This easily out-Hollywoods Hollywood, and is stretching the unreal to the point where, as was sometimes stated about Douglas Sirk, ’l’archi-faux devient faux’. Or should we perhaps say that with the outrageousness of true popular art big themes are sculpted into a whole where total lie and total truth are inseparable?

Peter von Bagh, Cinegrafie, n. 18, 2005