White Nights (1985 film)
White Nights is a 1985 American musical drama film directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines, Jerzy Skolimowski, Helen Mirren and Isabella Rossellini.[3][4] It was choreographed by Twyla Tharp. The title refers to the sunlit summer nights of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), the setting for the majority of the film, situated just a few degrees below the Arctic Circle.
White Nights
James Goldman
Eric Hughes
Nancy Dowd (uncredited)
James Goldman
William S. Gilmore
Taylor Hackford
- November 8, 1985 (Chicago International Film Festival)
- November 22, 1985
136 minutes
United States
English
Russian
$10–20 million[1]
$42.2 million[2]
The film is notable both for the dancing of Hines and Baryshnikov and for the Academy Award-winning song "Say You, Say Me" by Lionel Richie in 1986, as well as "Separate Lives" performed by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin and written by Stephen Bishop (also nominated). The film was the international film debut of Isabella Rossellini[1] and Taylor Hackford met his future wife, Helen Mirren, during filming.[5]
Plot[edit]
Nikolai 'Kolya' Rodchenko (Baryshnikov) is a Soviet ballet dancer who had previously defected from the Soviet Union. When the plane carrying him to his next performance in Tokyo has electrical problems and crash lands in Siberia, he is injured and recognized by KGB officer Colonel Chaiko (Jerzy Skolimowski). Chaiko contacts tap dancer Raymond Greenwood (Hines), who has defected to the Soviet Union, and gets them both to Leningrad. Chaiko wants Kolya to dance at the season's opening night at the Kirov, and Raymond to look after Kolya. To convince Kolya, Chaiko uses Galina Ivanova (Helen Mirren), a former ballerina who never left the Soviet Union and is an old flame of Kolya.
After an initial period of racial and artistic friction, the two dancers (and defectors in opposite directions) become strong friends. When Raymond discovers that his wife Darya (Isabella Rossellini) is pregnant, he decides he does not want their child to grow up in the Soviet Union, and together, with Kolya, they plan an escape with the help of Galina, who still has feelings for Rodchenko. During the escape attempt, Raymond chooses to stay behind in order to delay Chaiko, gaining time for Kolya and Darya to get to the consulate at Leningrad. Although Raymond is captured and incarcerated, he is traded by the Soviets for a political prisoner from Latin America, and reunites with Darya and Kolya.
The opening ballet sequence, Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, originally choreographed by Roland Petit in 1946 and performed anew by Baryshnikov and Florence Faure, was filmed at the Bristol Hippodrome.[1] The gentleman paging the curtain for Baryshnikov is John Randall, the theatre's technical director at the time.
In 1985, many western Cold War movies supposedly set in Russia would use locations in the Finnish capital Helsinki with an architectural style resembling Leningrad. For White Nights, a team of travelogue filmmakers from Finland, who previously had done work in the Soviet Union, were hired to film a number of locations in Leningrad, such as the Kirov Theatre and the Lenin monument, as well as a Chaika state-limousine. These scenes were then inserted into the movie, some being in-car scenes. Hackford was disappointed with critics who wrote negative reviews based on their belief that Helsinki had been used.
The film was also shot in Finland (including the island of Reposaari) and Lisbon, Portugal, as well as other parts of the United Kingdom including Elstree Studios and RAF Machrihanish in Scotland.[1]
Filmmakers normally use models to film the crash-landing of an aircraft as expensive as a Boeing 747. For the filming of the crash sequence of a British Orient 747 at the beginning of White Nights, two different full-sized aircraft were used.
The film contains an early-career performance by Maryam d'Abo, later to star as a Bond girl in the James Bond film The Living Daylights.
White Nights was dedicated "in loving memory" to Mary E. Hackford (mother of Taylor) and Jerry Benjamin (father of executive supervisor Stuart Benjamin),[1] both of whom died prior to its release.