The End of St. Petersburg
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin and Mikhail Doller
Year Released: 1927
Rating: 2.0
Ah! A Pudovkin film! And it contains all the things you know and expect: working man good, men in suits bad, money bad, haggard women with potatoes good, montage very good. Beautifully composed and taped together (including him in the list of the great editors is mandatory), but hollow on any other level - the revolution probably wasn't the best of ideas (this is me in Understatement Mode) and cinema-as-propaganda doesn't necessarily hold up in the long run. So why am I going through some of the famous Russian pictures? Curiosity, I suppose - plus, I find it easy to separate the message from the style.