Movie Review: "The Circus"

How an old Soviet propaganda film highlights the modern Left's changed attitude to race

I recently came across an interesting historical artifact that underscores the change in left-wing attitudes to race and racism of recent decades.

It is a YouTube video of a 1936 Soviet movie, The Circus. It is about a fictional American circus performer, Marion Dixon, played by the Russian actress Lyubov Orlova.

Note: to view English subtitles click the cog symbol at bottom right after playing starts.

The opening scene features Dixon fleeing for her life from an enraged mob in the Jim Crow south, desperately clutching her baby, after it was disclosed that the child had a black father.

This was the time of the notorious anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting inter-racial sexual relations. The scene, while not based on any documented incident, was all too plausible, given the prevalence of mob violence and lynching during that period.

Dixon manages to escape and flees to the Soviet Union, in the company of a German theatrical agent named von Kneischitz who she meets en route. On arriving in the Worker’s Paradise, she is welcomed with open arms and is able to resume her circus career. However, it all goes sour in the final ten minutes of the film, when the treacherous agent (presumably a closet Nazi) denounces her “crime” to the circus audience, expecting them to behave like those wicked, racist Americans.

This is how the dialogue goes:

von Kneischitz (addressing the audience): Stop it! Stop it! This woman…keep away from that rotten creature. She was the mistress of a negro! And she gave birth to a black child. A black child, ladies and gentlemen!

Circus manager: What’s the problem?

von Kneischitz: A black child, ladies and gentlemen. A white woman giving birth to a black child!

Circus manager (laughing): So what?

von Kneischitz: It’s a racial crime! She should be banished from civilized society, which belongs only to white people!

At this point the child wanders over to the audience, and the crowd turns on von Kneischitz, laughing at him.

von Kneischitz: Why are you all laughing, ladies and gentlemen?

Circus manager: What did you expect? What’s the tragedy?

von Kneischitz slinks out of the hall, presumably to meet a sticky end as he is followed by two uniformed NKVD types.

The child is now passed from one audience member to another, with each singing a verse of a lullaby in a different language of the Soviet Union, concluding with a verse sung in Yiddish, and finally by a black person singing in Russian.

Marion Dixon (deeply moved): What does that mean?

Circus manager: It means that in our country we absolutely love all kids. You may have a kid of any colour. A black kid, or a white kid, or a red one, or even a kid striped like a zebra, or polka-dotted kids, whatever! It’s our pleasure!

The film ends with Marion Dixon marching triumphantly in Red Square carrying a red banner. Her question answered, “now I see”. The Soviet Union is a land of absolute colourblind equality. How wonderful!

As a reflection of Soviet reality this was, of course, a grotesque lie. It was made the year before Stalin’s great terror reached its apogee and followed the mass deportation and deliberate starvation of millions of Russian peasants, to be followed by deportations of entire ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty.  Solomon Mikhoels, the Jewish performer who sang the Yiddish verse in the film, was murdered by the regime in 1948 during Stalin’s antisemitic turn.

However, viewed as a piece of propaganda, the film was brilliant. It was clearly targeted at Western audiences, especially people of progressive inclination in the US. This was three years before the release of Gone With the Wind, which romanticized the slave-owning antebellum South.

That was the old left-wing view of race, expressed in the movie twenty-seven years before Martin Luther King’s famous speech where he looks forward to the day when children would be judged by “the content of their character, not the colour of their skin.”

Soviet propagandists tried to key-into the concerns and preoccupations of people who might be sympathetic to their cause, and in some cases, as with this film, they did so very effectively.

In the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman, a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer who headed the scientific team that developed the first atomic bomb, the authors describe how Oppenheimer and his circle of brilliant young scientists working on atomic physics and quantum theory in the 1930s were almost all either communist party members or close sympathizers (“fellow travellers”) with the party. This included Oppenheimer himself, who denied ever being a party member but did not deny having communist sympathies.

How could some they have been so blind to the real nature of the Stalin regime? No doubt there was some unworldly naivete on the part of people totally absorbed in their scientific work. But, as the book describes, in some cases there was also a tremendous will to believe in Stalin’s Russia as a genuine utopia in the making, where racism, class divisions, and the “exploitation of man by man” would be abolished.

Notwithstanding its misuse by the Stalin regime, the aspiration to transcend racial distinctions and achieve a colour-blind society is a noble one, that has been effectively abandoned by many progressives with the rise of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its sub-discipline Whiteness Studies in Western academia.

The very idea of colour-blindness is now deprecated, seen as providing cover for continuing less visible forms of racism, indeed as serving to perpetuate them. By failing to “see” colour, so the argument goes, someone thereby becomes blind to continuing inequities and disparities based on race.

This misconstrues what the colour-blind ideal actually means. It does not mean people should be blind to instances, or systemic features, that effectively discriminate racially. Obviously, people need to perceive these features in order to effectively address them.

In his paper that The Case for Color-Blindness, the political philosopher Peter C. Myers addresses these misconceptions in detail, and what colour-blindness properly understood involves. According to Myers “The idea of “color-blindness” signifies, in its core meaning, that distinctions of race or color play no proper part in the distributions of burdens and benefits in public law or policy.”

This is an aspiration that used to be the conventional wisdom of the Left, and is well worth reviving. Instead, the ideologues of Critical Race Theory have worked to bring about a hyper-awareness of race, to make race a central and essential feature of everyone’s identity, on the basis of which they assume the role of oppressor or oppressed.

By pathologizing “whiteness”, and “white people”, the race ideologues seek to create a new moral hierarchy based on race that inverts the old one where black skin was seen as the Mark of Cain. Do you think this is an exaggeration? Check out this recent academic paper, which argues that the Mark of Cain actually refers to white skin. How much better to dispense with race-based hierarchies and distinctions altogether.