“Terrible sight”: for which Lyubov Orlova’s last film was banned in the USSR

Starling and Lyra was the name of Lyubov Orlova’s last film. It was filmed by the actress’s husband – director Grigory Alexandrov – and, of course, as always, he invited his wife to play the main role. The two-part military drama about spouse-scouts was supposed to be released in 1974, but shortly before the premiere, the picture was banned from airing. What happened?

On April 24, 1974, the police arrested Günther Guillaume, assistant to German Chancellor Willy Brandt. It turned out that he was a spy for the GDR, and it was the most successful operation of the West German secret service. A year later, he and his wife Christelle Guillaume were convicted of spying for the German Democratic Republic for 13 and 8 years respectively.

But is this the only reason for the banning of the film? In fact, there is one more.

Rumor has it that Lyubov Orlova herself banned the film after seeing the footage. Orlova at that time was already 71 years old, and she played a thirty-year-old woman. Actor Pyotr Velyaminov, who played the husband of the heroine Orlova, was 24 years younger than the actress. The film crew had to resort to various tricks to hide the age of the actress: for example, Orlova never appeared in the frame without gloves hiding the skin of her hands, and in the scenes where it was necessary to show her hands, the actress was replaced by a double. Dmitry Shcheglov, who later wrote a biographical book about Orlova “Love and Mask”, talks about the creation of the film:

“There was an episode in the scene with Pyotr Velyaminov, where she is standing in a wedding dress, in a veil. It was a strange and terrible sight. His head was visibly shaking in the frame. She only cared about her age. Enough has already been said about his hands. Neither the carefully adjusted light nor the special angles helped. The work was reduced to the staging of the “staging of the eyelashes”. The real theme of the picture is Orlova’s desperate struggle with time. It was a film where two people – the director and the main performer – didn’t feel, didn’t see, didn’t know their age either. Funny stories circulated around the studio, somewhat similar to the jokes that were circulating at the time about anemic former Politburos. “Starling and Lyra” was quickly renamed “Sclerosis and Menopause”. However, they tried to spare Lyubochka.

As a result, Starling and Lyra were not shown in movies or on television.