The Kazakh classic OUR DEAR DOCTOR (1958), This is a musical directed by Shaken Aimanov. I has been compared to Eldar Ryazanov's famous Soviet musical blockbuster CARNAVAL NIGHT (1956), and l see why - memorable melodies, a portpurry of various artistic performances, and a feel-good atmosphere throughout, even joyfulness. In short, a film entertainment that is radically different from the heavy duty moralism that Soviet cinema is often associated with. I found the combination of Western and Oriental-style numbers particularly interesting.
The film's crew is representative of the multiculturalism of many of the studio teams of the Central Asian republics of the USSR - the writer and the cameraman are Ukrainian Jews, the assistant director is Belorussian, the composer - Russian. Aimanov himself was a Shakesperian actor turned film director: he plays with this fact in one of the scenes where he positions himself in front of a portrayal that shows him on stage.
For me, however, the most interesting realisation was that actor Yuriy Pomerantsev, who plays the 60-year old doctor, was actually only 34 at the time of shooting. He was born in Kiev in 1923, but then the family came to Kazakhstan where his father worked in Karaganda only to become a victim of the purges in 1938. Orphaned at 15, young Yuriy Pomerantsev moved to Moscow with his mother. At 18 he was mobilised in WWII, was heavily wounded at 19 and, after recovery, in 1943, reunited with his mother who was evacuated in Alma Ata. Here, he got into acting by chance - being cast in a small role in Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE. He then stayed on in Kazakhstan and had a long career of creativity, mainly in theatre: I see reports that he was active on stage at the age of 99, in February 2022, just a month before passing away in March of the same year.
