A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927)

Here’s a trifle, you might even consider it an inside joke, from those merry pranksters in the Soviet Union. 

In 1926, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as part of publicity tour of Europe, paid a visit to Moscow, where they were mobbed with the same degree of enthusiasm with which their personal appearances were met at home. They, along with Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, and, of all people, Pearl White, were among Russia’s favorite American performers. In fact, from 1922 to1928, 43.7% of all movies shown in the Soviet Union were from America.

During their visit, the Yanks were approached with an idea for a locally produced film and the idea struck them as being funny and novel. The picture became A Kiss From Mary Pickford.

Goga Palkin (Igor Ilyinsky) is an usher in a movie theater who is in love with Dusya Galkina (Anel Sudakevich), a student actor who considers herself in training to become a movie star. He pines for her every minute but she will have nothing to do with him until he becomes a star, too.

So Goga practices swashbuckling in the Fairbanks manner and even tries wearing a mask, ala Zorro. At one point, using a cane for a sword, he drives his blade through a wall and it stops just short of stabbing a young woman in the nose. “Be calm,” he tells her. “We must all suffer for the sake of art.”

He then endures a series of absurd tests to discern his “professional fitness” for a job as a stunt man. The doctors (?) professors (?) administering the test looked they leaked out of a German Expressionist film.

At the studio, the director decides to turn Goga into “the Russian Douglas Fairbanks,” and while he tries to convince his stunt man that he can make the change, Fairbanks and Pickford come to the studio. Film from their 1926 visit is inserted into our movie, with their foreknowledge, and they look like they’re really enjoying themselves. 

Mary sees Goga and thinks he’s amusing. To please her local fans, she offers to play a love scene with the Russian Fairbanks, ending it with a chaste kiss on his cheek.

Now Goga is a star and Dusya falls for him. Unfortunately, so does everyone else and his life becomes a chase around the film lot until Dusya finally scrapes away Mary’s lipstick.

The film was directed by Sergei Komarov and co-written by Komarov and Vadim Shershenevich. Komarov also served as cinematographer.

Maybe the sarcasm above relating to a perceived lack of humor in official Sovietdom—it’s that wholesale slaughter of the imperial family and their servants thing—is misplaced. Marina L. Levitina, an expert on Soviet cinema, writes:  “In the early twentieth century, there existed a certain perception in the Russian popular imagination of a new, modern set of qualities, which included some of the same human traits that earlier impressed the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville in Americans. Among these traits were efficiency, physical fitness, optimism, and the frontiersman’s adventurous, pioneering spirit. After 1917, these traits were praised as new exemplary qualities that citizens of the young Soviet state needed to acquire.

Contemporary Soviet descriptions of Fairbanks emphasize his ability to make the viewers laugh: ‘Humour is an ever-present part of his pictures. Laughter, healthy and good laughter, traverses all his films as a kind of a central line,’ writes Ter-Oganesov in Kino-zhurnal.”

You frequently see reference to Hollywood being America’s good-will ambassador to the world. And at times, it really is.