BALALAIKA

US, 1939, 102 minutes, Black and white.
Nelson Eddy, Ilona Massey, Charles Ruggles, Frank Morgan, Lionel Attwill, C. Aubrey Smith, Joyce Compton.
Directed by Reinhold Schunzel.

Balalaika is one of several MGM musicals made with singer, Nelson Eddy, without Jeanette Mac Donald. His co-star is Ilona Massey, a Hungarian actress who had also appeared in Rosalie with Nelson Eddy.

The setting of this film is in Russia, 1914, prior to the outbreak of World War I. The focus is on a group of Cossacks, led by a prince, Nelson Eddy, who ride, singing, into town and go to a cafe, The Balalaika. There is a great deal of singing, dancing, Russian style, and the famous theme song. The singer at the restaurant is Lydia, Iona Massey. Her family has fallen on hard times and she has to make performing and mixing with the soldiers, rowdy lot, to support them.

The prince is attracted to her and she to him, but he does not reveal who he really is. He offers her an audition for the opera, Frank Morgan is the manager, and she is fulfilling a lifetime wish, going to the cemetery to confide in her dead mother. In the meantime, her brother is making speeches against the government, is killed when the Cossacks attack the protesters. A revolutionary has a hold over Lydia’s father and plans an assassination of the prince’s father during the opera performance. However, a message comes through about Germany attacking Russia and the assassination is foiled. The two lovers have told the truth about each other but the Prince feels it patriotic he has to go to war.

There are some trench and battle scenes – with a moving moment where the Germans are heard singing Silent Night and the Russians listen with the prince joining in the chorus.

The action cuts suddenly to Paris after the war, the prince’s assistant now owning a restaurant where a number of the Russian nobility are working, the servants previously working for the nobility, the nobility now serving the servants. This includes the prince, his father, the theatre manager and his wife. One evening, Lydia arrives and there is happy reunion and a happy ever after.

The film includes a range of songs, including some operate pieces, the Toreador song from Carmen, Scheherezade by Rimsky-Korsakov? as well as some popular melodies like Balalaika.