The First Time Armenian Was Spoken In An American Movie: “The Deep Six” (1958) 🇦🇲🎞️
- Arno Maratti
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
@ZartonkMedia
➖➖➖ In 1958, the Armenian language reached an American movie screen for the first time. The film was “The Deep Six,” a WWII Navy drama starring Alan Ladd and directed by Rudolph Maté, and the man who delivered the scene was Ross Bagdasarian, the Armenian American musician who would soon create Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Bagdasarian plays Pvt. Aaron Slobodjian, a sailor who brings his shipmates to a gathering of fellow Armenians. He climbs onto the stage and addresses the room in fluent Armenian, then turns to his Navy friends and switches to English: “Let’s show our sailor cousins what real Armenian hospitality is.”
In the scene, the waiter who greets the table was played by Al Nalbandian, a San Francisco florist and actor of Armenian descent. He says “parev” to the sailors, and Ross orders. Nalbandian ran his family’s flower stand near Union Square for more than 70 years while building a screen career that ran through “American Graffiti,” “The Conversation,” “Tucker,” and other films, many of them for Francis Ford Coppola. His account of the scene passed down through his family.
It was the first time Armenian was spoken in an American film. Earlier American pictures had told Armenian stories, including the 1919 silent film “Ravished Armenia,” but a silent film carried no spoken language. And the Armenian-language talking films of the 1930s and 1940s were made overseas by Soviet studios, not in Hollywood.
For Bagdasarian, it fit a pattern. He had done the same with music, turning an Armenian folk melody into a number one pop hit, “Come On-a My House,” written with his cousin William Saroyan.
The story reaches the present through Al Nalbandian’s son-in-law, film producer Patrick Malkassian, whose 2022 film “Amerikatsi” drew on his own family’s survival of the Soviet era.
The scene runs only a few minutes, but it put the Armenian language on an American screen for the first time.
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