Mussolini shrugged: Ayn Rand revived

National Review, Jan 27, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

AYN RAND'S first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936. It holds up well after fifty years, thanks to a gripping plot and a property in which it's almost unique: social realism about the Soviet Union.

It was also filmed, in 1942, but without Miss Rand's consent or knowledge. The Fascist government of Italy sponsored a production that ironically violated her property rights, thereby indicating a certain deaffness to her message.

Nevertheless, when Miss Rand saw the film after the war, she was pleased. It's generally faithful to her book, and the casting is superior to that of the Hollywood version of The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper and was made with her close cooperation.

The postwar settlement gave her the rights to the movie of We the Living, and her estate has now released it for general circulation. In Italy it was shown in two parts (and was a hit); here, it has been edited to a single three-hour film, with English subtitles.

The plot is simple. In the early Twenties, in Petrograd, a girl named Kira falls in love with a young man named Leo, son of an executed aristocrat. Because of his "class origins," Leo is denied medical care when he contracts tuberculosis. In order to save him, Kira becomes the mistress of a powerful but essentially decent Communist Party official, Andrei. When Leo recovers, Kira has to prevent her two lovers from finding out about each other.

Inevitably, they do find out. Andrei searches Leo's apartment in connection with a black-market investigation, and there discovers Kira's dresses. Leo is arrested and faces the death penalty. But with Leo apparently lost, Kira furiously tells Andrei the whole truth: she was only his whore, and she did it all for Leo. She defies him to do his worst. But Andrei is shattered at the realization of what he has done, and of what Communism is. He contrives to save Leo's life, then shoots himself. Leo, however, cynically spurns Kira and chooses instead the life of a prosperous gigolo. Here the film ends; in the book, Kira is killed while trying to flee to the free world.

The denouement reveals Andrei as the nobler of the two men: unlike Leo, he prefers death to dishonor. He serves Communism only as long as he can believe in it. Except in his love for Kira, he serves it incorruptibly. Leo, on the other hand, is willing to compromise himself. When Andrei sees the truth, he sacrifices himself for Kira as she has sacrificed herself for Leo. But Leo is as incapable of such love as he is of understanding what Kira has done for him, and she never tries to explain her actions to him: rather mysteriously, she simply allows him to think the worst about her and to sink further into cynicism. Is she sparing him the torment of full knowledge? Or is it futile to try to keep his love, and pointless to justify herself? Or is this perhaps simply one of those oldfashioned stories in which characters don't discuss their own motives too much?

Be that as it may, Kira loves Leo, not the more deserving Andrei. When it comes to winning maidens' affections, the smart money is still on reckless virility rather than moral rectitude, and reckless virility happens to be Leo's long suit. He tells off Soviet officials (including Andrei) with a courage that frightens Kira for him, even as it makes her admire him all the more. Andrei has his own courage, as his final Sydney Carton gesture shows, but as a GPU officer he's hardly in a position to display it: in executing his duties he simply appears ruthless.

THE BOOK'S POWER lies in its depiction of the grim, grimy terror that prevailed even in the supposed golden age of Lenin. Everyone is reduced to a debasing dependence on the state, less because of the fear of arbitrary arrest than because of the total absence of property rights and economic freedom. You can be suddenly deprived of anything-job, possessions, living quarters-that is coveted by some Party hack. The characters are driven to to a dying, corruption, prostitution, and treachery by the system that promised them "liberation."

We the Living makes the issue of property rights vivid and vital as no other fiction does, as far as I know. It also shows the formation of a malign status system in a society in which everything is up for grabs, where connections are everything and talent is next to nothing. Miss Rand does for Lenin's Soviet Union something like what Bonfire of the Vanities does for New York-again ironically, because she'd have had only scorn for Tom Wolfe's notion that status information is the stuff of the novel.

In the movie, Communism appears as tyrannical, but not in the fabric of the economy: a Fascist-sponsored film would not tend to stress the dangers of central control as such. Randians like to say that the Italian public flocked to the film because they perceived its relevance to Fascism itself, but it's more likely that they simply enjoyed the Puccinian story.

And the stars. Fosco Giachetti plays Andrei with careworn dignity; Rossano Brazzi, as Leo, looks younger and handsomer than I'd ever realized he'd been, and he shades the part nicely from dashing lover to bitter roue. But best of all is Alida Valli as Kira. I've always wondered why Valli never became a big star here; she's best known as Orson Welles's mistress in The Third Man, where she seemed to embody the devastated soul of postwar Europe. She was only 21 when she played Kira, subtle expressions rippling over her lovely face as elusively as the waves on a wind-ruffled pond. (In her fifties, her autumnal beauty was on display in Bertolucci's The Spiders Stratagem. That's the first and lest I've seen of her since she stalked past desolate Joseph Cotten in the final frame of The Third Man.)