The Golden Key

(1939, U.S.S.R.) black and white 84/76/72/70 minutes
(aka ZOLOTOJ KLJUCHIK, BURATINO, PINOCCHIO)
Gosudarstvenii Komitet po Kinematografii (Goskino [II]) /
Amkino Corporation / Kinostudiya "Mosfilm"
Story: Carlo Collodi (from his story "Pinocchio")(uncredited)
Screenplay: Nikolai Leshchenko, Lyudmila Tolstaya, Aleksei Tolstoy
Music: Lev Shvarts
Cinematography: Nikolai Renkov
Art Direction: Y. Shvetz
Produced by Aleksandr Ptushko
Directed by Aleksandr Ptushko

With: O. Shaganova-Obraztsova (Buratino), A. Shagin (Karabas Barabas), Sergei Martinson (Duramar), G. Yuvarov (Papa Carlo), R. Khairova (Pierrot), M. Dagmarov (Giuseppe), T. Adelgeim (Malvina), Nikolai Bogolyubov (Captain), Nikolai Michurin (Sandro)

***

We are indebted to Marc Berezin for supplying the following biographical information about "The Golden Key", and its auther, Alexei Tolstoy, from a transcript of "The Voice of Russia" broadcast November 1, 2001.

…It’s a fairy tale about a fairy tale. Once upon a time there lived a Count, a real-born Count too, even though his friends would often address him as “Comrade Count” just for the fun of it. Small wonder too because this Count lived in the first half of the 20th century and of all places, in Soviet Russia. What really matters, however, is that he was an outstanding writer. His name was Alexei Tolstoy, the author of the historical epic “Peter the Great”, “The Road to Calvary” trilogy and the science fiction novels “Aelita”, “Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid” and other books.

One day, in the mid-Thirties, Alexei Tolstoy – already a living classic - was approached by a young lady. Her name was Natalya Sats. She was setting up a musical theater for children in Moscow and she asked Tolstoy to write something they could stage there. Tolstoy agreed and in 1935 there came out the fascinating “Golden Key or the Amazing Adventures of Buratino and His Friends” which has since been a must reading for Russian children.

It was not Alexei Tolstoy who invented this funny wooden character though. Fifty years before that, a children’s tale was published in Italy about Buratino’s prototype Pinocchio. The editor of the Rome-based magazine “Giornale Per I Bambini” asked writer and journalist Carlo Collodi to contribute a thrilling tale for kids that would be reasonably instructive and bristling with exciting stories. Carlo immediately latched on to the idea and wrote the whole story in a single night! It is a rambunctious, adventure-filled story about a wooden creature, which always gets into trouble because of its nasty character. The name Pinocchio derives from “pino”– Italian for a pine tree. Week after week, the magazine wrote about Pinocchio’s never ending antics. The author wanted to call it quits but the young readers kept asking for more and more and more… Finally, in 1883, the stories came out as a book entitled “The Adventures of Pinocchio” and has since been reprinted a zillion times in 87 languages all around the world… “…That’s how it eventually happened. And the whole thing started… with an ordinary-looking billet winding up in the hands of the very kind Uncle Carlo…”

Comparing Tolstoy’s story with its Italian prototype is a very fascinating business indeed. What Carlo Collodi wrote was essentially a repetition of Genesis as we know it from the Bible. Really, a carpenter carves a human being from a billet (Genesis), Pinocchio then away from of home (the Fall) and, after many trials and tribulations comes back, repents and becomes a lively, intelligent and good-looking boy (Salvation). In Tolstoy’s story the main focus is on the mystery of the Golden Key, which is missing altogether from the original tale. Everything here is simpler, funnier and romantically supercharged too. Buratino is a lucky guy getting the Golden Key for a kiss. We should do him justice though and admit that he can fight to be happy if he has to and make good use of his hard-won happiness. He never thinks twice before taking things firmly in his hands and change life to look the way he wants it to be. He encourages his melancholic and daydreaming friend Pierrot to become a real fighter and even the ideal Malvina starts to “improve” influenced by his get-up-and-boogie personality. “I will sell ice cream and tickets, and, if you find me talented, I will be playing nice-looking girls too…” she says when the puppets finally get a theater all their own.

…In the small Italian town of Collodi (sounds exactly like the name of Pinocchio’s author, doesn’t it?) there is a statue of the wooden boy. To the undying Pinocchio from the grateful readers aged four to seventy, reads a plaque under the feet of Pinocchio who will probably forever remain one of the funniest and most touching literary characters of all time… and that’s the end of the fun-filled story of the Golden Key. When you have the key and you know the door, just go ahead and open it up…

***

Famed Russian fantasy director Aleksandr Ptushko's second film is a wonderful, neo-realist take on Carlo Collodi's "Pinocchio", with some significant changes via storyteller Alexei Tolstoy. The little wooden boy becomes Buratino, and his father/creator is Papa Carlo. The evil circusmaster who beocmes obssessed with Buratino is Karabas, a vile ogre straight from the pages of antiquity.

Filmed in stark black and white with bigger-than-life characters and voluptuous music, THE GOLDEN KEY shows a fairy tale universe very real and even crude, taking a semi-realistic look at life in a small peasant village. This is counterpointed with the most fabulous fantasy sequences, certainly one enduring answer to a community's poverty and despair. The film juggles these two ends of a surreal aestethic spectrum well, showing them ultimately not to be so far apart as they may at first seem.

The human characters are all cartoon grotesques, which enhances their ability to interact with the non-human puppet characters, and a delightful theatricality permeates the entire roduction. Buratino is quite small, maybe a foot tall, much smaller than the "life-size boy" look of most Western adaptations of the tale. He talks in a funny, speeded-up voice, and sounds like a cartoon mouse.

Papa Carlo is a kindly combination of patriarch, craftsman and scientist; his "workshop" even has odd artifacts of a scientific laboratory in them. Karabas is pure brute evil; when one of his "puppets" misbehaves, he whips him like a mad dog. Speaking of which, a talking black poodle figures prominently in Buratino's eventual salvation.

Buratino's origin is somewhat odd; a drunken man tries to chop a piece of wood, but it yells at him to stop (in a speeded-up voice)! He sells it to a nieghbor, the craftsman Carlo. (Papa) Carlo takes the wood, wrapped in a coat and hat, back to his shop and starts to carve away. Soon he has carved a little boy's head. The eyes on the wooden head move in a creepy bit of stop-motion photography, and Buratino comes to life.

The manifestation of Buratino, and other puppet-characters, is wrought in a marvelous way. It is a combination of stop-motion puppet photography, intermingled with miniaturized live-action characters, and woven together with some real marionette puppetry. The result is dazzling and disorienting.

There is some incredible process photography mingling a tiny live-action Buratino with (much) bigger adults. In several scenes, Buratino is played by a miniaturized moppet in costume and mask, prancing around in the bright sunlight amongst giant adults, an effect truly unusual, and even somewhat disturbing.

There is also a good helping of stop-motion puppets in fantastic table-top setttings, scenes on a peer with Willis O'Brien, George Pal, and even early Ray Harryhausen. The "Wonderland" sets, which look like storybook etchings, also predate the work of Czech animator Karel Zeman.

What is even more magical is that there is no consistancy in the fantasy sequences, and their various tricks; a real poodle interacts with a girl puppet. A puppet turns into a live-action being. In other scenes, the puppets are live-action children wearing grotesque face masks, making them seem less than human. Humans changing to puppets changing to stop-motion dolls, sometimes within the same scene, befits Ptushko's phantasmagoric agenda best well; it suggests a fantasy universe unbridled, unfettered.

Now, this jumping from one fantasy allusion format to another might appear foreign, even inconsistant to modern audiences, but we like it alot. The film thus retains its sense of always-new wonders, as one never know what tricks the filmmakers are going to offer next. The tendency, at least in Hollywood, to narrow the focus and breadth of visual effects to achieve a certain intended consistancy of realism was the first step towards a sameness and blandness which led, ultimately, to that bane of the fantasy film, the CGI revolution.

The stagebound quality of some of the live-action sequences are reminiscent of the silent cinema, which is of course consistant with the time period. However, the central part of the film is told completely in miniatures (albeit miniature sets which may have tiny humans superimposed on them).

There is also some cartoon violence (literally), as a rat tries to maul Buratino, and later when Cat And Fox molest the poor puppet-boy, and toss him into a lake. As mentioned earlier, THE GOLDEN KEY takes great liberties with the Collodi tale; there is no Pippifax, no Playland, no turning into donkeys, and no giant fish to swallow Papa Carlo.

To more than compensate, there is a terrific finale, in which Buratino, Carlo and gang escape Karabas to an immense undergdound cavern. A storybook grows into a giant, and out of it emerges a maejestic flying schooner! A full-scale model of this fanciful scientific creation is highly impressive, a concept borrowed no doubt from the "Albatross", the aerial juggernaut in H.G. Wells' MASTER OF THE WORLD. The explorers on board the "space ship" rescue Buratino and gang, and whisk them off safely to Valhalla, in an extraordinary science-fiction ending to a most unsusal adaptation of a timeless fairy tale.

The "Buratino" take on Pinnochio was filmed at least twice more in Russia, in 1960 and 1975, but Ptushko's THE GOLDEN KEY likely will remain the most experimental, innovative, and glorious of all.

Our thanks to Marc Berezin for supplying a copy of this rarest of fantasy films!

Video/DVD availability: VHS (Ruscico)

Links of related interest:
a synopsis of the Tolstoi version
a biography of Tolstoi