If Gregory Flaxman is right - & I'm very happy to agree with him -
that romantic comedy is the utopian genre par excellence, then we
must include the 'Stalinist' musical comedies by Grigory Alexandrov,
especially Svetlyi Put' (The Radiant Path - 1940) (There's a nice
piece on the film by Masha Enzensberger in Taylor & Spring:
*Stalinism and Soviet Cinema* (Routledge, 1993). A segment of this
film reappears (possibly unintentionally) in the final scene of
'Grease'.
Helen Grace
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