Yuri Gadyukin

Yuri Ivanovich Gadyukin (Юрий Гадюкин), born Leningrad, USSR, 1932?, birth date unknown, died London, England November 11, 1960. Director of cult movies. Although Russian-born, he only made one film in the Soviet Union, Where the Tractors Roam (Там, где бродят тракторы), most of his career being spent in Great Britain following his defection in 1955. He made three films in London, the last of which The Graven Idol was left incomplete when Gadyukin was murdered in 1960.

Early Life and Russian Career
Details of Yuri Gadyukin’s early years are limited and most known information is owed to his own unverified account. He was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to a middle-class family, his father a music teacher. During the Second World War Leningrad came under siege and, aged 12, Gadyukin was drafted as a child soldier. His later teenage years are a blank, Gadyukin himself refused to be drawn into discussion on this period of his life.

Some accounts claim Gadyukin to have worked as a background artist in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, pt.3 but this is unlikely as this was shot in Mosfilm in Moscow and there’s no record of Gadyukin in that city. Gadyukin himself claimed that as a young man he met Eisenstein and was inspired by a conversation they had, so it remains a possibility. In 1949 Gadyukin was hired as a junior assistant director at Lenfilm studios in his hometown. He was quickly spotted as a talent and rose fast through the ranks.

His first film, Where the Tractors Roam, came to be as the result of a drunken conversation. Gadyukin tells how, when drinking with screenwriter Yevgeni Pomeshchikov, they wrote the outline for a story that parodied the Soviet realist cinema of the day. This document was mislaid and then mistakenly passed on to a Lenfilm executive who failed to notice the ironic tone and took it in earnest. Both men were immediately tasked with making the movie happen. While Pomeshchikov’s script was written with extreme caution, Gadyukin’s direction had the boldness of youth resulting in a finished piece that trod a precarious knife-edge between earnestness and satire.

Given the film’s satirical intent, it appeared to encapsulate everything for which Soviet cinema was striving, as such Lenfilm, who failed to catch the satirical tone, warmly received it. When the film was premiered at the Bucharest Festival of Socialist Film however, the Romanian press saw it as a brave satire and took it as evidence of a sudden liberalization of Russian cinema. Although the Kremlin’s grip on film culture was easing at the time it was far from ready for a full-blown satire, and the film was withdrawn. Rather than awaiting his dismissal or further punishment, Gadyukin decided to ride the controversy and defected. For reasons that remain unclear he was not welcomed by the United States government and wound up defecting to Great Britain.

Career in Britain
Following the controversy of Where the Tractor’s Roam, Gadyukin’s arrival in London was received with great expectations. His first production in the UK was Waiting… in 1956, a project born out of a desire to film Samuel Beckett’s stage play “Waiting for Godot”. Beckett however, was unhappy with the textual changes Gadyukin proposed and withheld permission for an adaptation. Gadyukin’s film is a testament to his ability to tread a fine line, being very close to Beckett’s play in places but always with sufficient alterations to avoid a lawsuit. Waiting… was both experimental in narrative and formal terms, much of the dialogue being a mix of English and Esperanto. Despite a warm reception from European festivals Waiting... met with mixed reviews from the British press and did little business.

Gadyukin decided to change tack with his next film The October Wedding which was much more in tune with the emerging fashion in Britain for so-called “kitchen sink realism” movies. Unwilling to be a journeyman director Gadyukin experimented with improvised dialogue and encouraged his actors to embrace Stanislavski technique, a move resisted by much of his cast, not least leading man Ian Hendry. On the film’s release in 1959 it was widely praised as helping to breathe new life into British cinema and Gadyukin was riding high.

Final Project and Death
Gadyukin’s final movie, The Graven Idol, went into production in May of 1960. This was a bold experiment aiming to advance the improvisational technique he’d used previously to the point where the entire story was improvised. Gadyukin would come to work with a loose idea of what he wanted to film that day based on the sets and cast available.

Despite initially promising results, after five months shooting the studios realized that Gadyukin was still far from completing the project. The plug was pulled, but Gadyukin continued shooting on his own dime. An accident on set finally proved too much for the studio bosses and the production was shut down. Meanwhile, various tensions had been building between cast and crew. A few days after the production was shut down, Gadyukin’s body was found floating in the River Thames with a gunshot wound to the head. Actor Harry Weathers was suspected of the murder and fled, successfully evading all efforts to find him. No one was ever charged for Yuri Gadyukin’s killing.

Filmography

 * 1954 Where the Tractors Roam
 * 1956 Waiting…
 * 1959 The October Wedding
 * 1960 The Graven Idol (unfinished)