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| Arise, ye brothers in starvation, yada yada-da-da-da... |
Today being May Day, the international day of the workingman, socialists everywhere the holiday is celebrated sing their anthem, The Internationale, the song of brotherhood and revolution. The song represents hope for the future as they see it and has rallied activists and revolutionaries for more than a century. It has been used by Communist regimes in place of religious observance as propaganda to reinforce their ideological control over the people long after corrupting the revolutions that brought them to power. And in fascistic countries, the song has provoked police terror against the people who dare sing it in public as a means to silence dissent. The implicit threat of the latter is part of the fabric of a significant scene in David Lean's grand-scale epic of romance amid the chaos of war and Red revolt, Doctor Zhivago (1965).
Unable to get permission to shoot the movie in the Soviet Union since the original Boris Pasternak novel was banned by the Communist authorities, Lean ended up filming in Spain, which had many locations suitable to depict the Russian countryside and mountains. Sections of Madrid and Canillas stood in for Moscow, as much of the architecture was similar enough to that of the Soviet capital to serve with just a bit of dressing with Russian-language signage and the construction of a ten-acre outdoor Moscow set to complete the illusion. However, one scene for the movie could have resulted in considerable political and legal troubles for the production crew and many of the Spanish extras taking part in the shoot.
Spain at the time of filming was still very firmly in the grip of the dictator Francisco Franco, who had led a brutal and ultimately successful civil war from 1936 to 1939 to crush the socialist Second Republic and replace it with his authoritarian fascist state. Marxists and socialists, as well as fellow fascist Falangists, trade unionists, liberal Catholics, intellectuals, Basque and Catalan nationalists, anyone perceived as a threat to Franco's power, were purged and persecuted without mercy for years after the Nationalist victory. The voice of the Spanish people was totally suppressed in the cultural and political clampdown that persisted almost up to Franco's death in 1975 and no one dared express any idea or sentiment that did not meet with State or Church approval in that era.
Though Spain often welcomed foreign film production for the boost it provided to the country's moribund economy, and Spanish cinematic professionals and actors eagerly participated in international co-production efforts as one of the few avenues of cultural and technical expression available to them, the ever-vigilant eye of Franco's secret police was always omnipresent and everyone knew enough to watch their step. And it was in this environment that Lean was to shoot the scene in which a large crowd of protesters gather in Tamskaya Avenue to demonstrate peacefully for justice, bread and peace, capping the event with a singing of The Internationale —which was, of course, banned in Spain:
The Internationale
(Lyrics by Eugene Pottier, music by Pierre Degeyter)
Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
(Refrain):
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.
(Refrain)
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E’er the thieves will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the forge must do their duty
And we’ll strike while the iron is hot.
(Refrain)
The scene was shot at three in the morning and, drawn out by reports that an actual uprising was in progress, police showed up to supervise the proceedings until Lean had finished. The extras who formed the crowd knew the police were on hand in both uniform and in secret. So, they deliberately sang the lyrics off-key and muddled the words as if they didn't understand what it was they were singing in hopes of avoiding arrest. They didn't dare do otherwise in the climate of the time. The ruse worked, Lean got his scene which helped set up the moment when Pasha and Yuri lost their naive innocence, and the extras got to go home and continue to have jobs in the Spanish film industry.
