Mister Twister

Mister Twister, 1963, A. Karanovitch, Soyuzmultfilm Studio. Based on the popular children’s poem written in 1933 by Samuel Marshak who is also credited with writing the script, “Mister Twister” tells the story of a wealthy American who travels with his family to Leningrad for a vacation. When he learns there are “guests of color” at the Angleterre hotel, he cancels his reservation. The concierge calls ahead to all other hotels in Leningrad and advises them not to give the American racist and his family a room. Mr. Twister returns to the Angleterre, and after spending the night in the lobby decides he has overcomes his prejudices. During the USSR school children regularly memorized the Marshak poem. Sonia Marshak. M.D. (Scientist): My great grandfather was a poet, satirist, and outstanding translator of English literature -- Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, and Kipling among others. He founded, in 1920, one of the first children’s theaters in the Soviet Union, and wrote plays for it. Highly effective in persuading gifted writers and artists to write for children, he also headed the Children’s Section of the State Publishing house. During the years of the Stalin terror, the Section came under attack for its alleged bourgeois leanings. Members the group were accused of being associated with “Samuel Marshak, Enemy of the People.” They were interrogated, killed, and sent to labor camps in Siberia and the Arctic. Julian Lowenfeld (translator): The animated film, made in the 60s, differs from the original poem, written in the 30s, in several curious ways. First of all, in the original poem, little Susan announces: I'm going to eat nothing but caviar black, And catch real live sturgeons in handfuls! On the banks of the Volga I'll ride in a troika I'll run round collective farms With nothing but raspberries heaped in my arms! Although Marshak is credited with the screenplay, we do not know why Susie's motives for visiting Russia were omitted from the film. Did the censors in Brezhnev's "era of stagnation" feel that an American millionaire's daughter supposedly wanting to visit the Soviet Union to pick raspberries at a collective farm sound so absurd it would seem satirical? Another curious twist to the Mr. Twister Film is the behavior of the concierge of the Angleterre. In the film, he plays an active part in teaching Mr. Twister a lesson about proletarian solidarity and the costs of intolerance, by phoning all the other hotels in town and telling them not to give Mr. Twister a room (even though rooms are available). But in the original poem, the concierge does no such thing--rooms truly are unavailable anywhere else, because Leningrad is full of foreign tourists in town for an international congress.