Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

garcianyssa This was an interesting movie to watch due to the format of the film itself. Although the film summary talked about a love story between Anka and a German prisoner of war there was no mention of the rest of the cast who the story also centered on. It was less of a love story and more of a story about a small village and the people living there. Throughout the whole movie there is a struggle between the workers and the owners of the shoe factory in the town, which reflects the national struggle at the time between the tsarist regime and the Bolshevik movement. Honestly, this movie was slightly confusing. Yes, it was very good at touching on a number of themes – how ideas can transcend national identities, workers united, and the greed of industry – but it went about it in a very confusing manner by jumping between different stories. It also seemed like the last 20 minutes of the film were rushed with the time skip and then trying to resolve the stories in a timely manner. Outskirts criticized the pre-revolutionary government with its portrayal of the shoe factory owner. The factory owner is portrayed as a greedy industrialist who only sees the war as a way to make profit and does not care for his fellow workers. However, this isn't made apparent until those last 20 minutes of the film. While the film is entertaining and contains typical party ideals it falls short in its presentation by trying to do too much at once.

hte-trasme There are a lot of things at work in this film. They're not all necessarily working together, but they're at work. This is often a serious war film, but we still have horses talking and characters winking broadly at the camera for comic effect when need be. Under the umbrella of telling us about of small Russian town (on the "outskirts") during a vital point in history, we end up with a story about a small shoe-factory that may or may not go on strike, one about a German tenant in Russia and his landlord, one about German prisoners of war held in the town and their search for work, and one about a potential romance between one of the soldiers and the landlord's daughter -- and that's before we jump ahead to 1917 for the last twenty minutes. Some of these subplots intertwine in interesting way, but they all cannot. It's filmed with a very striking visual style and filled with memorable images (even occasionally using a visual pun for a scene change), but it still has the early-sound characteristic of moving fairly slowly. That wouldn't be a problem due to the interesting visuals, except that it magnifies the scattered nature of the stories. At its heart, the conflict of the landlord who is caught between affection for his tenant and nationalism turning him against Germans, and later must deal with this again when he catches his daughter with the German prisoner, is a touching one. It also allows for several conflicted and three-dimensional characters in the midst of things. Jumping ahead to the revolution feels out of place and disjointed to this viewer, but perhaps that was mitigated at the time by the fact that for the intended audience of this film, this was a war at home that was well within living memory, and it would have been very directly relevant to them. In all, the film is imposingly made, but doesn't come off all the way due to the fact that its matter is too scattered to make up one story, but not as broad-lens at it would have to be if it wanted completely to be "the story of a town." But it's well worth a watch, both for historical interest and for its commendable camera and direction work.

chaos-rampant Introduction: Kuleshov was a genius, and most of his students are worth getting to know about.Barnet was really the most inconspicuous of Kuleshov's cycle, always quite apart from cinematic polemics raging at the time. He looked like a big lunkhead when we first see him as a cowboy in Kuleshov's Mr. West from '24. His first stab at directing assigned by his mentor, as I read, was a long serial on Fritz Lang territory about spies and counter-spies and international intrigue, except humorous and whimsical. He made another two silent comedies, one of which I've seen, very delicate and sweet-natured class conflict, almost dainty blood.Now this, about events leading up to the Revolution of '17 and so by nature more sombre and reflective. Eisenstein and Pudovkin had turned out rigorously-driven paeans for the 10 year anniversary, Barnet's is something else altogether.It is comedy about neighbors and brothers who are too stubborn to embrace true feelings, searing drama in the next beat about these mutual feelings sublimated in the massive conflict of war. It bleeds and you laugh with a laughter that is sadness.It is plain fun to watch for the duration. There is sound but nowhere near as radical use as in Dezertir from that same year. Barnet was a much more gentle soul, eventually took his own life - the story goes - because he could no longer deliver art on the level he aspired to.It's all in the ending here, a true apotheosis of cinematic expression and one of the best moments in 30's film, truly far-reaching stuff. You have to do the work though, it's not laid out in the open, submerged further afield where censors wouldn't have the imagination to apprehend him.Two brothers have gone to war, the father receives news from the trenches that one has died, the young, rash one. Meanwhile a German POW has returned in his place; the same age, also a shoe-maker, a worker, and finds love in captivity the young brother was denied in an early scene on the same bench. The brother dead for a dubious cause has been surreally transmuted back home into a narrative that now turns vindictive, cruel, anxious - the German POW is summarily beaten by Russians, persecuted. Barnet's coup is that these scenes depict a Revolution under foot, a valiant cause in communist lore.Meanwhile the older brother is still at the front fighting the war. We hardly ever see the German enemy, it's mostly exhausted soldiers futilely storming desolate no man's land. He calls off the bloodshed, single-handedly walking in the firing range and is summarily arrested by Russians as a traitor. The last news he hears is that the Winter Palace has been stormed. His response, on the threshold of consciousness: "what a rush!".Barnet had Kuleshov's films to draw from on how to outwit the censors, but he outdoes even his mentor here in his ability to envision a multi-dimensional fabric.

artihcus022 The remarkable qualities of this early sound film pertain to it's stunning use of sound which is inventive and innovative by any and all standards, the stunning camera movements and long takes. Just as remarkable is the storytelling which plays like a series of short stories and sketches rather than a novella or novel. Yet it doesn't break these short stories into segments or blocks or frame it unlike other attempts at multiple short narratives in a feature.The movement between the various segments and stories is very poetic like from one Greek chorus to another. The central conceit being between the conflict between the war frontlines and the homefront of the village. The scenes of warfare shown in this film is harsh and brutal in a way that anticipates Roberto Rossellini's or Samuel Fuller's later films.What makes it even more harsh is the sense of futility in the conflict. As the infantrymen who fight each other in the trenches have more in common than either would do with their civilian countryman, anticipating Renoir's La Grande Illusion. One breathtaking scene is when one Russian soldier saves a German from getting bombed and then tells him after their initial celebration that he'll be their prisoner now.Equally moving is the tender love story between a Russian girl Anka and a German POW given permission to work in the village. This love story is made possible because Anka's father's friend Robert Karlovish, a German taught her enough about his country to escape the xenophobia of that community at war. Also interesting is the sense of homoeroticism, neither vulgar nor campy, among the various male characters. Early in the film when the soldiers leave for the front there is a wonderful shot of two men kissing each other on the lips which is shown casually without any sense of sensation in the presentation of this scene. Barnet in his film shows that despite the conflict, the violence, the sense of division among his characters(all acted superbly conveying a naturalism absent in many early talkies) there is always a brief glimpse of what things could be or should be.Even if for reasons of propaganda the film ends with the parade of saviour communists, Barnet has managed to create a film that transcends that all the more by ending the film in a shot worthy of Dovzhenko(a key influence on this film) where a character after hearing the arrival of the commmunists, breathes close to death, "What a rush!" and presumably dies off-screen. The world of this film belongs to people, to human relations and not to party lines.