Ranks and People
From his early silent works, the great Russian film director, Herr Yakov Protazanov, made literary adaptations from equally great Russian writers, as is the case with "Chiny I Lyudi" ( Ranks And People ) (1929) in which three short stories by Chekhov, "Anna On The Neck", "Death Of A Petty Official" and "Chameleon" were assembled for the silent screen.
Casts & Crew
Mikhail Tarkhanov
Mariya Strelkova
Andrey Petrovsky
Nikolay Shcherbakov
Viktor Stanitsyn
Ivan Moskvin
Yevgeni Yershov
Daniil Vvedenskiy
Vladimir Popov
Sofya Levitina
Yelena Maksimova
Varvara Rizenko
Serguei Sideliov
Also Directed by Yakov Protazanov
A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.
Directed by Yakov Protazanov.
After the death of Count Chambery his wife and daughter were left without means of subsistence. Seeing no other way out, a young woman settles maid in the house of Baroness Angers.
During the good old days of the Russian aristocracy, that is to say, before the October Revolution, in the city of Moscow there was a fancy restaurant which catered to the appetites and egos of the rich. In one such establishment works a middle-aged waiter who is devoted to serving his bourgeoisie clients correctly. However, his life outside his job is very different: His son was killed during the Russian civil war and the waiter's wife died of grief as a result....
The story of a British POW who converts to communism.
A great stage performer falls ill and loses her voice and beauty, and she and her admirer's lives crumble because of it.
The priests, stock market officials, and police conspire to squeeze income out of pilgrims come to see relics of a Christ like figure. A pair of con men try to pass of a resurrected saint.
Also Directed by Mikhail Doller
Primarily a biographical documentary about the military career of Alexander Vasilvich Suvorov, who was Field Marshal of the armies of Catherine the Great and Czar Paul I. After many military successes during the reign of Catherine, General Suvorov broke with her successor, Paul I, the Mad Emperor, over questions regarding army policy. He went into retirement and wrote "The Science of Victory," containing maxims such as "Swiftness of movement accompanies victory," and "the real general is he who defeats the enemy before reaching him." The czar recalled Suvorov to become the leader of the joint armies of Russia and Austria against Napoleon.
As a response to criticism for the allegedly excessive “mass appeal” of his earlier epic STORM OVER ASIA (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin unleashed his flair for experimentation in what was supposed to be the director’s first sound feature. Everything went wrong: technical problems forced him to complete the film as a silent; viewers were baffled by the lack of a recognizable plot; then, the ideological climate of the Soviet Union changed. He was now being blamed for catering to bourgeois taste! Time has come to set the record straight. Here’s lyrical cinema at its best, deliberately operatic and yet intimate as it matches the characters’ inner life with the solemn rhythms of nature, and depicted through breathtaking black-and-white photography. A sensation at last year’s Pordenone fest, Pudovkin’s long-forgotten swan song to the art of montage is resurrected by Gabriel Thibaudeau’s emotionally charged live music performance. –PCU (USSR, 1930, 75m)