“A terrible sight”: for which the last film Lyubov Eagle Star was banned in the USSR

Starling and Lyra was the title of Ljubov Orlova’s last film. It was filmed by the husband of the actress – director Grigory Alexandrov – and of course, as always, he invited his wife to the main role. The two-part military drama about scout husbands was supposed to be released in 1974, but the film was banned shortly before its premiere. What happened?

On April 24, 1974, the police arrested Günther Guillaume, assistant to German Chancellor Willy Brandt. As it turned out, he was a spy for the GDR, and this was the most successful operation of the West German secret services. A year later, he and his wife Christelle Guillaume were sentenced to 13 and 8 years respectively for spying for the German Democratic Republic.

But is this the only reason for banning the film? There is actually one more.

It was said that Lyubov Orlova herself banned the film after seeing the footage. Orlova was already 71 years old at the time and played a thirty-year-old woman. Actor Pyotr Velyaminov, who played the husband of the heroine Orlova, was 24 years younger than the actress. The film crew had to do various tricks to hide the age of the actress: for example, Orlova never appeared in the shot without gloves covering the skin of her hands, and in scenes where it was necessary to show her hands, the actress was replaced by a stand-in. Dmitry Shcheglov, who later wrote a biographical book about Orlova “Love and a Mask”, talks about the creation of the film:

“In the scene there was an episode with Peter Velyaminov, where he is standing in a wedding dress, in a veil. It was a strange and terrible sight. Her head was visibly shaking in the frame. All she cared about was how old she looked. Enough has been said about her hands. Neither the carefully adjusted light nor the special angles helped. The work was reduced to staging a “mise-en-scène of algae”. The real theme of the film is Orlova’s desperate struggle against time. It was a film where two people – the director and the main performer – didn’t feel, didn’t see, didn’t know their age anyway. Funny stories circulated around the studio, somewhat similar to the jokes that were made at the time about the anemic elders of the Politburo. “Starling and Lyra” was quickly renamed “Sclerosis and Menopause”. However, they tried to spare Lyubochka.

As a result, Starling and Lyra were not featured in either movies or television.