“Love, Politics And Ayn Rand”

Posted: 25 May 2010 09:04 AM PDT

Ayn Rand, the Russian-born American philosopher-novelist and crusader for capitalism, has been enjoying something of a revival, due partly to the belief that her warnings of creeping socialism are coming true under the Obama Administration. Those interested in Rand's oeuvre should take note of the recent DVD release of We the Living, a film adaptation of her first novel, by the same title. But this movie should also appeal to those who love old films and rare finds from film history.

We the Living, a 1942 Italian production, comes from the age of Mussolini when it straddled the fence between propaganda and dissent, and features appearances by two charismatic young actors who later moved on to international stardom (Alida Valli, who later starred alongside Orson Welles in The Third Man, and Rossano Brazzi, of South Pacific fame). While it would be a mistake to see the film or the book as a prescient commentary on any current events, the story's central themes of individual freedom, the power of the human spirit and resistance to tyranny are truly timeless.

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Published in 1936, We the Living takes place in Rand's native Russia in the 1920s. The heroine, young, strong-willed Kira Argounova, struggles to survive under a regime that treats her as a social undesirable: the daughter of a former factory owner and a staunch anti-Communist. Her dreams of being an engineer and sharing her life with the man she loves, ex-aristocrat Leo Kovalensky, are relentlessly shattered by the Soviet state. Her suspect background gets her purged from the university, and the once-proud Leo is eventually reduced to a bitter, self-loathing cynic who sees Kira's love as a burden.

Along the way, Kira finds herself entangled with dedicated Communist and GPU (secret police) officer Andrei Taganov, who falls in love with her and whose love she pretends to return in order to save Leo's life when he desperately needs treatment for tuberculosis and no state clinic will give him a place. By the end Andrei has come to understand Kira's (and Rand's) truth: No cause that quashes freedom and sacrifices the individual to the collective good can be truly noble.

In the United States the book quickly sank into oblivion--partly, perhaps, because its scathing portrayal of the Soviet experiment did not sit well with most reviewers and educated readers of the time. (Success did not come to Rand until her second novel, The Fountainhead.) An Italian translation of We the Living, however, sold very well and went through two editions. Ironically its anticommunism made it attractive to Mussolini's fascist regime during the war--even though Rand's passionate defense of the individual against the state was as antagonistic to fascism as it was to communism.

In 1942 the Italian government sanctioned a film version of the novel, intended as anti-Bolshevik and anti-Russian propaganda--in blatant disregard of copyright infringement. The adaptation by Goffredo Alessandrini consisted of two films, each about two hours long: Noi Vivi (We the Living) and Addio Kira (Goodbye, Kira). Valli and Brazzi costarred as Kira and Leo; Fosco Giachetti, a popular leading man of Fascist-era Italian cinema, played Andrei.

The two-part film was a hit, but it also raised the eyebrows of officials in the Mussolini government who belatedly realized that its pro-freedom message could be read as anti-Fascist. After a six-month run the film was pulled from distribution, the prints and negatives seized by the Secretariat of the National Fascist Party and the producer summoned to party headquarters in Rome to answer charges of making an anti-Fascist film.

After the end of the war Rand learned about the Italian film and was not only outraged by the brazen intellectual property theft but alarmed by the idea that her antistatist book had been transformed into fascist propaganda. After seeing the films, however, she was impressed with it--except for a few alterations, including a scene in which a revolutionary sailor's rant against the country's new Communist rulers was "enhanced" with an anti-Semitic line.

At the time David O. Selznick had expressed some interest in producing an American film version of We the Living, and Valli, by then working in Hollywood, was reportedly eager to reprise her role as Kira. When these plans did not come to fruition, Rand began to consider a revised and subtitled version of the Italian film (for which she collected about $23,000 in compensation for her rights in an out-of-court settlement in 1961).

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Sunday, May 30, 2010