Over two million Russians went into exile after 1917 to escape persecution under Bolshevik rule. -- Anna Horsbrugh-Porter, Memories of Revolution
Lenin no doubt wouldn't have dared to forbid Maria Alekseyevna Ouspenskaya from remaining in New York once she landed on US soil. Her role as the little grandmother to Charles Boyer's dandy in the original 1939 Love Affair withstands a century of scrutiny as a revelation of what Europe lost through the destruction of class hierarchy. Such a grandiloquent magnificent woman whose noblesse oblige would never be stripped away by Philadelphia Corporation for the Aging, which, when all is said and done, is a peasant and slave lineage lawn mower. The film is an artificially sweetened romance bracketing Irene Dunne's glamour disrupted by the sudden shadow of mortality, but those episodes with Maria, like Proust's diplomat, whose name I am not going to chase, reinstates the arguments for peerage, irrevocably lost to the world. This is not to indicate that Boyer's cosmopolitan appeal no longer exists, only that the grace of pedigree is basically an historical heirloom of no consequence.
At its best, caste systems left functioning societies in their wake, and the subtle passage of the baton between Maria as a woman who embodied her station, to Irene Dunne, as a theatric diva, is the beginning of all modern evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment