Strike (1925) review

Hordes of workers go on strike - the breaking point was the suicide of a colleague who was wrongfully accused of stealing - but meet with considerable resistance from the Fat Cats with their cigars and three-piece suits and juicing devices (!?) and the 'characters' they enlist as provocateurs (they look like they were taken from a Dick Tracy comic). Commie nonsense aside, Eisenstein certainly shows he had a sense of the comical - as opposed to Pudovkin's stone-faced formalism - and parts of this picture come across as campy and outrageous, sufficiently distracting from the Leninist politics. In terms of editing and composition, few have ever trumped Eisenstein and his peers.