Director: Aleksandr Medvedkin
Year Released: 1935
Rating: 3.0
"Last Bolshevik" Medvedkin skewers the Communist ethos by featuring a peasant named, appropriately, "Loser," who is sent out to find happiness, earns success as a farmer (with his wife eventually replacing his mischievous horse and dragging the plow around) but soon has The State (and its citizens) close in on him, taking his earned wealth, making demands, forcing him to go to war and turning him into a water bearer. How Medvedkin wasn't imprisoned for making this (as someone said) is something of a miracle (the film did get banned), and even though it doesn't possess the comedic brilliance and timing of Chaplin and Keaton (to name two) and it skips forward quite a bit (scenes appear to have been removed and a color sequence was shot but missing from the final product) it still works wonderfully as absurd (and cunning) social satire. Inventiveness is in every sequence: from the 'nuns' in see-through tops, to the house that gets picked up and carried away, to the tractor operator who has his machine spin in circles while he indulges in a healthy dose of vodka.
