USSR

A lavish two-part costume tragedy based on the classic The Dowerless Girl by the nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, A Cruel Romance (also known as Ruthless Romance) was the biggest Soviet box-office hit of 1984, though it seems to have had little international exposure until now.

It marked a change of direction for the veteran Eldar Ryazanov, who up to then had tended to specialise in contemporary comedy, though it seems to have done his career little harm: he was made a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union that year – and no wonder, quite apart from the film’s commercial success, its mostly wart-ridden portrait of the venal, money-grubbing bourgeoisie of the then-discredited Tsarist era must have gone down a storm with the Soviet authorities.Read More »

Synopsis:
Lash of the Czar was one of several English-language titles for the Russian film Belyi Orel. The film was based on The Governor, a play by Leonid Andreyev. V.I. Kachalov plays the governor of a small Russian province who tries to treat the people under his authority with kindness and equanimity. But when a local factory goes on strike, the governor buckles under to pressure from the Czar and orders the wholesale slaughter of the strikers. He pays for this betrayal of his trust with his life — at the hands of a courageous Bolshevik spy. Anna Sten, who in 1934 was brought to the U.S. as Sam Goldwyn’s “answer” to Greta Garbo, appears as the governor’s wife. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviRead More »

Quote:
Can you find happiness in the big city? The young hat maker Natascha, who lives with her grandfather in a suburb covered in winter snow, has to commute by train from the village to Moscow to deliver her creations to the extravagant Irene’s hat shop. For the administration, Irene claims Natascha to be her subtenant in order to be able to have more living space. The clumsy railway official woos the lovely country girl with his ravishing smile. But she enters into a fictitious marriage with the provincial Ilya in order to get him a room in Moscow. With an apparently worthless lottery ticket, which Irene’s husband gives to Natascha, the entanglements become turbulent. Boris Barnet describes the contrasts between city and country and the new living conditions in Moscow in a stylish and socially critical way. Three great acting talents, Anna Stén, Iwan Kowal-Samborski and Vladimir Fogel, form the triangle of relationships. Originally ordered as a vehicle to advertise the State Lottery, the film made the studio rich and the natural talent director Boris Barnet famous as the founder of lyrical comedy.Read More »

Anatoli Yefremovich Novoseltsev works in a statistics institution, whose director is an unattractive and bossy woman. An old friend of his, Yuri Grigorievich Samokhvalov, who gets appointed assistant director of the institution, wants to make Novoseltsev the head of the department but encounters objections from Ludmila Prokopievna Kalugina, the director. Samokhvalov then advises Novoseltsev to lightly hit on the boss. Ironically, Novoseltsev and Kalugina fall in love with each other…Read More »

Sorok Serdets is a 49 minute politprosvet film centered on electrical power plants, the new beating hearts planned for Soviet society and economy.

The infotainment flick is full of both creative metaphors and rather rude suggestions towards the bourgeois and capitalists, conveying historical materialism in a bombastic way that anyone can understand. The most prominent metaphor, a horse transformed by technology into a factory, connects peasant toil to industrialization. And it goes on to contextualize the early 20s grain famines, NEP, and Stalin’s new 5-year-plan phases, and it gets you on board for the role of electrification in the development of a workers’ state in the Soviet Union.Read More »

Quote:
The first “Elegy” by Alexander Sokurov appeared in 1984. The legendary fame of the great Russian singer Fiodor Shaliapin, the fame that was still alive in his homeland, resisted to the official tendency of reproaching him for emigrating from Russia. When Sokurov, whose first films seemed to be buried forever in the closed film archives and whose every new work was stopped in the very beginning, made his “Elegy” — without financing, supported only by the enthusiasm of his team, — the Leningrad Documentary Films Productions tried to legalize the film, but with no success. The answer of the highest cinema officials was: “Shaliapin is not forgiven.” It was the time when Shaliapin had not yet got the “imperial” pardon.Read More »

During the most liberal period of the Khrushchev regime, Grigori Chukrai, director of the classic Ballad of a Soldier, presided over an “experimental studio” dedicated to nurturing new talents. The studio was closed after it produced the three-part Beginning of an Unknown Era, conceived as a memorial for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. The film was shelved and to this day the negative is reported lost. However, a print of Andrei Smirnov’s episode Angel and Larissa Shepitko’s Homeland of Electricity survived – both films were premiered at the 1987 Moscow Film Festival. It is understandable that the authorities might have considered Angel and Homeland of Electricity inappropriate for trumped-up celebrations of the Revolution.Read More »

Intergirl is a film adaptation of the eponymous book by Vladimir Kunin, set in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the time of “perestroika” during the 1980s. Tatyana is a beautiful Russian nurse who is underpaid at her hospital job, so she turns a prostitute catering to international tourists. She becomes well paid in dollars, and helps her ailing mother to survive. Tatyana’s international clients enlighten her about the life in other countries, so she accepts a marriage in order to escape from the grim Soviet reality. But even being married to a decent man abroad, she still suffers from being labeled as an ex-Soviet prostitute, and her new life is full of new troubles.Read More »

Rich imagery and political allegory enliven an already complex story in this late Soviet-era mystery/drama. In the story, a government investigator has come to town to look into the validity of bribery charges that were brought against an official there. In the meantime, we discover that a twin and his brother have been engaged in a kind of very close warfare. One twin was a medical doctor, and was married to a beautiful woman. The second twin was interested in bedding the wife, and had no feeling for his brother. Thus, he impersonated him in the hospital, and openly engaged in medical malpractice of the grossest sort, resulting in a patient’s death. The first twin lost his career and was forced to support himself by going door to door selling kerosene. The second (and clearly sociopathic) twin, naturally, became an important figure in the activities of his local soviet.Read More »