Leon Garros Is Looking for His Friend. How the first Soviet-French comedy was shot in Moscow

The Soviet-French comedy Léon Garros Is Looking for His Friend is not widely known today. However, at one time it attracted a lot of attention. Actors from Paris spent almost a year in Moscow while it was being filmed. This mos.ru article describes what they saw and what came out of it.

Charles de Gaulle, the first President of the Fifth Republic, arrived in Moscow on 20 June, 1966. Newspapers and magazines front-paged numerous photos of the event: the important guest was welcomed at Vnukovo Airport, shown Leninskiye Gory and the Kremlin and driven along Gorky Street (now Tverskaya Street). His official visit lasted for 10 days. From Moscow, de Gaulle took a long journey around the entire USSR. In his person, France showed its willingness to cooperate with the Soviet Union despite ideological differences. This was an important step in bilateral relations, which led to them warming noticeably. This step was important but not the first one.

A different French delegation, not so official, arrived in Moscow seven years earlier, in summer 1959. Film director Marcello Pagliero, screenwriter Michel Cournot, TV journalist Leon Zitrone and actorsJean Rochefort and Jean Gaven arrived in Moscow to make a joint Soviet-French film (in France it was called “Vingt mille lieues sur la terre,” or “20,000 Leagues Across the Land”).

The script was co-written by Michel Cournot, grand master of Soviet drama Sergei Mikhalkov and screenwriter Leonid Zorin. The film had plenty of ardour, optimism and flexibility. So, Leon Garros, a famous French correspondent, arrived in Moscow to prepare a major report for the French audience. In addition to business tasks, he pursued a personal goal — to find Muscovite Boris Vaganov, with whom he had fled from a Nazi death camp during the terrible war years. His search for his friend took more time than he originally thought. It transpired that Boris had left Moscow for a new job five years earlier. The comedy turns into a road movie. Together with friends Fernand and Gregoire, and interpreter Nikolai, the main character drives by car around the entire Soviet Union, up to the Far North. Everywhere he finds things to admire and be happy about.

Making a dashing U-turn, the French car enters Kutuzovsky Prospekt. They see a huge building with a spire. “Hotel Ukraina,” they read with the stress on the last syllables. “This is not a hotel, it is an opera house!” exclaims one of them having barely crossed the threshold. Another Soviet skyscraper is visible through the doorway behind the backs of the astonished guests. Apparently this is a high rise on Vosstaniya Square (now Kudrinskaya Square). Most probably, the building was not real but simply a painting on a white background — it was absolutely necessary for it to appear in the movie. The skyscrapers, completed in 1957, were Moscow’s main architectural novelty and needed to be depicted in a film that would be seen abroad.

The guests are surprised by many things they see in this hotel that looks like an opera house: from a beautiful lift operator with fluent French to a power shower that perfectly mimics the sound of rain for recording a lyrical prelude to a report on their arrival in the Soviet capital. The guests also find it interesting to walk outside. Here is the Kievskaya metro station. It’s also new and was opened to passengers in 1953. It has marble seats on the platforms and pylons that are luxuriously decorated with mosaic panels. Light music is being played in the metro and it is easy to meet a famous singer on an escalator. The singer is played by Tatyana Samoilova who is well known in France for her starring role in the film “The Cranes Are Flying.” In 1958, this film by Mikhail Kalatozov won the Palme D’Or, the main prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival.

Lenin will appear in conversations later — when Leon Garros goes to Red Square to record the next part of his report. He happens to see the changing of the guards at the Mausoleum. He will be stunned by the firm tread of the soldiers and will tell the French audience about the queue of Soviet citizens who have come to see the late Lenin.

“This queue never ends. Nikolai, has it been like this for a long time?” he asks the interpreter merrily. “Yes,” Nikolai says in a surprisingly serious tone. “It has been like this for 35 years now.”

The film covered one important 1959 summer sports event: a football match between a team composed of players from the Moscow clubs and the French Reims that was won 4 -1 by the Soviet team. “I hesitate to translate for you what Monsieur Gregoire has called the referee,” says the narrator in the mild voice of Zinovy Gerdt who goes on to say: “Knowing that the film will be shown in France, our operators politely put the cameras by the goal posts of the Moscow team so as not to upset the French fans by the four goals in the gates of the Reims team.”

Tula motor scooters were premium transport vehicles, if this term can be applied to the Soviet reality. The model looks foreign for a reason — Soviet designers modelled it on the Goggo 200 motor scooter by the German Hans Glas GmbH, a concern that no longer exists. Its wide wheels and high cross-country ability were welcomed by the Soviet drivers. Incidentally, at the same time as the Tula plant, the Vyatka-Polyansk plant also began to produce motor scooters. Its Vyatka motor scooter was very similar to the legendary Italian Vespa.

Main hero

Leon Zitrone, who played the role of journalist Leon Garros, was not a professional actor. It could be said that in the film he played himself and not only because he was also a journalist. Like the character he played, Zitrone had serious links with Russia: he was born there. He considered his work trip to the USSR as a return home.

Born in 1914, Leon was the first child of chemical engineer Rodolph Zitrone and his wife Catherine Hawkins who lived in Petrograd. In October 1917, the family was in Sweden and after the revolution they decided not to return to Russia but to settle in France. In Paris, his father became a tailor and opened his own tailor shop “Clothes Clinic” where customers could order new outfits and have old ones repaired and cleaned.

As members of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation, Leon’s parents were driven to a labour camp in the German city of Oranienburg. Being mobilised in 1940, Leon was taken prisoner in Belgium but escaped. After the war, Leon helped his father in his tailor shop and then became a journalist.

A graduate of the Superior School of Journalism of Paris, in 1948 Leon received a job at a radio station — largely because of his mastery of several foreign languages. From 1954, he began appearing on television, first as a news presenter and later as the author of his own programmes. For most of his career, Leon Zitrone was a sports commentator— he conducted live reports from the Tour de France races six times, covered the Olympics eight times and was a commentator at horse races.

In cinema, he often played the roles of journalists and sports commentators so his appearance in a Soviet stadium was not a surprise to the French spectators. What was surprising is that his hero did not speak a word of Russian and kept getting into awkward situations in the USSR. In real life, Leon had an excellent command of Russian and this was widely known. “He is fluent in three languages: French, Russian and subservient” — this is a well-known statement by journalist Claude Darget who thought Zitrone’s reports were too enthusiastic and lacking in critical insight.

How it was in reality

Leon Garros Is Looking for His Friend became a second joint Soviet-French film after Normandy-Nieman by Jean Dreville and Damir Vyatich-Berezhnykh. The USSR was a very attractive market for French films and France launched a special operation. Filmmaker Marcello Pagliero who adhered to communist views was invited to work on a joint comedy. Moreover, he was familiar in the USSR owing to his leading role in the drama Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini, which was a great success in the USSR in 1947.

Three months were allotted for shooting the film — this was the period for which Leon Zitrone was allowed to take undated leave. However, the “three months” dragged on for almost a year. The main difficulty was that the Soviet participants in the project did not give complete carte blanche to their French colleagues. Scriptwriter Michel Cournot had to change dialogues at the request of his Soviet colleagues almost every day. Neorealist Marcello Pagliero was angry: he was not allowed to film a horse-driven cart in a Moscow street because it was more appropriate to show cars and tractors.

The editing and voice acting also took a long time. The French name of the movie was changed several times. As a result, the film was seen by about 50,000 people in France. On the contrary, in the USSR it became one of the top films at the box office in 1961.

Unlike the film’s heroes, the French crew was not too happy about its protracted trip to the USSR. However, the long journey had its pluses. Actor Jean Rochefort who played womaniser Fernand, met a girl named Alexandra Mosava on the set and she later became his wife. After the film was made, the main hero wrote a book Leon Zitrone Tells You about the USSR, which became a bestseller.