Cabin fever… By the Law (1926), Barbican with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected… When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. … unable to do the unexpected, (they) are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives... In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

Jack London, The Unexpected (1906)

 

There were several moments as this extraordinary film reached its climax when I lost track of which musician was making which noise so closely aligned were Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, especially as the former plucked the heavy strings whilst hammering their keys and Martin used snare, cymbal and bass drum in rapid polyrhythmic clusters. This was a classic Sunday afternoon Barbican silent film screening and the accompaniment plus the kind of knowledgeable and adventurous audience created such an atmosphere with this film that it was irresistibly entertaining. We were also left challenged by the force of Lev Kuleshov’s film and the eternal questions it addressed: mortality and morality, gold at the heart of all evil, a Soviet version of Greed, a proto noir mixed with post-revolutionary nervous exhaustion…

 

Now, I don’t suppose Jack London had all this in mind when he wrote The Unexpected*, the short story on which this film was based, in 1905**. That said, at 21 he had joined the Klondike Gold Rush goldrush in July 1897, with his sister's husband, one Captain Shepard. He suffered as many others did from malnutrition in the cold remote conditions and developed scurvy, losing four of his front teeth… and being marked for life by striations on his face. Later on, he covered the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904 for the San Francisco Examiner which saw him briefly imprisoned in Japan: honestly, he makes Ernest Hemmingway look a little lightweight!

 

So it was that London’s prose was filled with his personal experience of otherwise civilised folk faced with having to adapt to new “grooves” as the quote at the top references and you can see how the frozen wastes of the Yukon, the ephemeral nature of capitalist values and the poison at its heart enabled Kuleshov to, just about, get funding from Soviet production company Goskino for what was the cheapest film made in Russia, as the Barbican’s programmer, Tamara Anderson, said in her introduction pointed out that this might be a record that it still holds.

 

We had faces then... Aleksandra Khokhlova

The results are extraordinary on any budget, with superb performances from the director’s wife Aleksandra Khokhlova, her screen husband as played by Sergei Komarov and especially Vladimir Fogel as the villain of the piece… or is he? That is the question or rather the willingness of the others to decide on his crime and subsequent punishment.

 

It’s interesting for a soviet Russian film to have kept the story’s Yukon setting but this is a film about greed and the “rules” of society. The protagonists are five emigrees from old Europe all in search of gold and the freedom it will bring. Their leader is the Swedish Hans Nelson (Komarov) who is married to the English Edith (Khokhlova) whilst Dutchy’s country of origin speaks for itself (he’s played by Porfiri Podobed). Then there’s Harky (Pyotr Galadzhev) and the Irish Michael (Fogel) who is the butt of a lot of the camp’s jokes as well as being the manual labourer – the class system is alive and well even in miniature.

 

We find the group preparing for the day as Michael fetches water from the river and plays his penny whistle for his dog – much to the slight annoyance of Hans – but to our delight especially as it gave Mr Horne the chance to weave some playful lines on his flute. Michael’s easy-going nature is curtailed by his duties and after cooking breakfast for the team he is told to prepare the equipment for relocation after Hans announces that the current location will not produce the gold they want. Having just sat down to eat he shares a bemused look before trudging of, breakfast interrupted, leaving the others to pick off his food.

 

Michael is however just about to save their bacon, as it were, when during the dismantling of the mine he gives the waters one last chance and slushing the dregs around a washing pan finds the golden nuggets at last. As he labours we repeatedly cut back to the camp with the other four lounging in the early morning sub smoking and relaxing after eating their meals and his. They quickly absorb his role in reversing their fortunes and celebrate by dancing together, his exclusion a signal of the mockery to come now that he has made them rich.

 

Vladimir Fogel

Things reach a head after Michael returns from hunting to find them eating lunch without him and laughing about his “envy” – the standard slur for the workers from Capital - and the tone shifts in an instance as, gun in hand he blasts first Harky – who slumps forward almost comically, head balanced in his food and preventing the table from collapse – and then Dutchy. The other two are in shock but Edith responds the quicker trying to wrest the gun away as her husband sits slack jawed before finally pounding Michael into submission. It’s the most desperate scene and, as London had written, completely unexpected.

 

Now Hans and Edith tie Michael up and must treat him as a prisoner through the long winter months until he can be tried “by the law” … What follows is an exploration of the morality of these cultured people in the circumstances of wild nature as the cabin is flooded and isolated in bitter conditions, can they hold out till Spring to take their man to the police and the courts and where does the authority of the law reside?

 

Edith clutches her bible and Hans is the more pragmatic but still restrained by his own code and Kuleshov makes the most of the tension with quick cuts interspersed with frequent close-ups and the constant reminder of their isolation on the freezing lake. Michael meanwhile has an unknowable, conflicted persona, the hard-working whistler who looks after his dog and who was turned into a rage by hard-hearted teasing and who seems unable or unwilling to explain why he killed.

 

The management relax as their worker discovers their fortune...

There is so much to work out in the film and a number of possible readings and it was a privilege to be sat head scratching with the rest of the audience as Stephen and Martin whipped up the most visceral improvisations for the wild interiors of this battering wilderness. Food for the heart and mind at the Barbican as you would expect.

 

*Published in McClure's Magazine, Aug 1906, London's story is apparently based upon actual events involving prospectors at Latuya Bay, Alaska 1900. Details here from historian David Reamer in the Anchorage Daily News.

 

**The script, co-written with Viktor Shklovsky also incorporated elements of London’s story, Just Meat (1907).

Jack London prospecting in Alaska 1897, he was just 21.

Train kept a rollin’… The Signal Tower (1924), Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, San Francisco Silent Film Festival Streaming

“… so, remember… never think of anything but your duty, until the track’s clear and your train’s safe!”

I’d previously seen a screening of Kevin Brownlow’s own copy of this film with Cyrus Gabrysch accompanying ferociously at a breathless evening at the Kennington Bioscope and this was a chance to see the restored film Kevin had played a major role in constructing with the SFSFF. There were no 35mm copies and so Robert Byrne of the SFSFF, Patrick Stanbury and Mr Brownlow worked with surviving 16mm elements, scanning materials at 4k, digitally repairing and creating a new 35mm negative from which prints were struck that were then dye tinted by specialist chemists in Prague.

The results were screened at the 2019 SFSFF and are astonishingly good, crystal clear with the beauty of the Californian forests fully enhanced and the locomotives as impressively highlighted as the actors. What is it about boys and steam trains? The accompaniment from Stephen Horne, aided by Martin Pyne/Frank on percussion, brought out the full majesty of the setting and the mechanics as well as one of the most febrile of conclusions in silent film.

Virginia Valli wrote a letter to Picture Play magazine from location in Mendocino County “I’m… just about as deep into the wilds of Northern California as any picture player has ever ventured. It’s beautiful; great redwoods, the bluest sky I have ever seen and brown and yellow maple leaves lending a dash of colour to the deep green of the firs. It’s so beautiful it’s actually awe-inspiring.”

This restoration certainly confirms that former and emphasises the “awe” in terms of Clarence Brown’s setting – the entire movie was shot in situ with sets built near the railway tracks – but also his treatment of the locos. In his introduction the Bioscope event and his essay for the SFSFF festival, Brownlow emphasised Brown’s fascination with trains. Brown was an engineer by training and clearly relished filming these steam-powered giants, getting up at the crack of dawn with his cameraman, Ben F. Reynolds, to record the trains powering through the pines with steam billowing above them and into the narrow sunlight.

The company hade rented a stretch of track which had only one service a day and so were able to take their time in presenting the life of this remote outpost and, with plenty of time to stage the most explosive of life-sized stunts: no scale models were damaged in the making of this film.

You can understand Brownlow’s passion for this is a film to make the rail enthusiast’s pulse race that bit faster as this is a film to increase everyone’s BPM as Brown winds the tension to almost unbearable levels: a runaway train speeding down towards a defenceless passenger train, a signal man fighting the elements and time to dislodge the tracks and faced with the horrific dilemma of having to save the many whilst his wife is under imminent threat from a boozed-up Wallace Beery with only one thing on his mind; a very vulnerable Virginia Valli.

Rockliffe Fellows watches an actual train steam by in a signal towerpurpose built on location

Those misty Mendocino Mountains contain a signal box vital to the effective running of the railroads and manned by just two men each working twelve hour shifts. The always upstanding Rockliffe Fellowes plays one of these “Tower Men”, Dave Taylor, whose wife Sally (Virginia Valli of Wild Oranges and The Pleasure Garden fame) and young lad Sonny (Frankie Darro) live in an idyllic wooden house near the tower – three miles from the nearest town.

Dave’s partner Old Bill (James O. Barrows) is indeed old and one-handed and so is replaced by Joe Standish (Wallace Beery) a man who’s flash suit and polished shoes mark him out as self-obsessed from the start and who is referred to as a “railroad Sheik” by one of the company’s engineers.

Dave lets Joe take over old Bill’s old room and he soon sets his sights on Sally even though her cousin Gertie (Dot Farley) initially acts as a kind of shield for his unabashed “sheik-ness”. Sally sends Gertie away to pay more attention to her fiancé unwittingly removing her own last line of defence… Joe soon makes his move and Dave kicks him out.

Wallace Beery and Virginia Valli

A storm is brewing though and as events take a serious turn on the mountain, Joe arrives late and, drunk in the heart of a crisis, forces Dave to take over and, once again kick him out. But that’s not the end of Joe’s nuisance as Dave sees him heading towards his home through the wind and rain… As disaster looms he must choose between Sally’s safety and his responsibilities to protect the passengers.

Beery does his usual top-notch job – his intensity belying his lighter, more likeable edge whilst Valli was the perfect complement, with a vulnerability running alongside her desperate resolution to resist the demon in her house; the film would not work as well without her imbuing Sally with so much depth and without Beery’s ability to kid us that he’s just not going to be as bad this time. Rockliffe Fellowes meanwhile, is the perfect heroic straight man to the descending chaos, a natural straight-backed affability informing his character.

Full marks to young Darro as well, aided and abetted by Jitney the Dog.

The family under threat

Biographer Gwenda Young describes The Signal Tower as one of Brown’s most personal films and he even made an appearance as a switchman trying to stop the runaway train as well as being “Conductor Brown” the addressee of a telegram. The “home invasion” represented by Beery’s character cuts to the heart of every relationship and powerfully contrasts with the accelerating disaster without. For the many or for the crucial few?

It’s a dramatic scenario and one that required a great deal of precision musical engineering from accompanists Stephen Horne and percussionist Martin Pyne with the latter providing the locomotive power to the former’s heat and steam. Brown’s film is full of controlled rhythms and contrasts from the towering bucolic surrounds to the dynamic force of the locomotion and the wayward intensity of the human drama and the score successfully navigated this triple track escalation to the film’s pulsating closure.

For the musician, every note’s a dead man’s handle – for the train driver, everything stops if you release your grip but the music is dependent on the continuation of a thousand stabs of precise pressure: all the right notes and all in the right order with Beery’s leery menace as much a threat as the speed of those locomotives. Stephen’s themes were as strong as you’d expect and the rhythmic requirements brought out the forces pushing the ultimate dramas of family, lives and morality under threat.

So, now is exactly the right time to join the SFSFF and to experience this film which is online until the 4^th April. There’s also a collection of some previous restorations and the promise of more to come. Full details are on their website here.

The root of all evil? Alraune (1928) with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, Barbican

So good to be back at the Barbican for a rare silent screening and with expertly inspired accompaniment from the two-man band of Horne and Pyne: four hands, ten instruments?

Directed with sure-footed competence more than style by Henrik Galeen, Alraune doesn’t rank with the best of Weimar cinema but it is still a very interesting film and one I’ve always wanted to see projected with live accompaniment. There are long passages when little happens but human interactions and the music sustained the film in these quieter moments. Variously known as Unholy Love, Mandrake, or A Daughter of Destiny, Alraune is missing a few key segments and again the accompaniment stepped in to offer thematic uplifts as well as emotional context throughout.

The music was eloquently varied, featuring more than just the duo’s prime instruments of drum and piano. Martin’s vibraphone, played with bow as well as soft mallets, lead the line in plaintive and eerie interplay with Stephen’s piano and as the two switched instruments they worked superbly well in support of the events on screen. There was magic in the air on and off.

On screen the magic stemmed from the Germanic Middle Age legend of the Mandrake root (the Alraune of the title), which – and listen carefully here - if left to absorb a hanged man’s “essence” in the ground under his execution, was capable of giving life either by enabling pregnancies or helping witches produce children without the aid of a living sperm donor. Such progeny were said to have no souls and sound far more trouble than they’re worth but, you know, there’s always someone ready to give it a go: to mess with Nature.

First of all, find a hanging man.

Step forward our mad scientist for the day, former Golem of this parish, Paul Wegener who plays Professor Jakob ten Brinken who has become interested in the nature versus nurture debate and this has somehow led him onto the legend of the root. By using the mandrake, he hopes to engineer a human being in order to establish “whether the parents’ genetic make-up, has a purely random effect on the offspring.” Can he create something pure and free from hereditary conditioning? I think you know where this is heading.

The professor grows the Mandrake as required and gets his nephew Franz Braun (Iván Petrovich) to help him find a lady of the “lowest order” - Die Dirne (The Whore) played by Mia Pankau - to act as the incubation chamber for the new being. Just as the woman arrives at the Professor’s apartments, turning in shock to see him emerge in white coat, the film jumps forward almost two decades… some sense lost through censoring perhaps?

Oh, mother... Mia Pankau

Alraune ten Brinken (Brigitte Helm) is the fully grown experiment, now at boarding school and is first seen toying with fly as it attempts to escape from a glass of water, she reaches out, not to rescue but to push it back; not the behaviour of a well-educated young woman. There is more to come as she leads her classmates into acts of rebellion, she dances, wears cologne and plants a stage beetle on the mother superior’s robes.

Clearly Alraune has out-grown school and to facilitate her escape has lured a young man, Wölfchen (Wolfgang Zilzer) into loving her: he is to steal money from his family and they are to run away. Once on their train to freedom she orders champagne and starts flirting with a likely lad who spies her from the corridor. Wölfchen tries to fight him off but there’s to be no respite as a troop of circus performers join the train. Alraune is immediately impressed by the magician’s sleight of hand especially when in one sexually obvious moment he lets a mouse run up her skirt; she leans back and looks him straight in the eye when even Bad Maria might think twice.

Paul Wegener and Brigitte Helm

At the circus things move on and Alraune is seen sharing a cigarette with the lion tamer (Louis Ralph) standing so close that she can light his fire with her own as it were. Chided for her wanton troublesome-ness Alraune walks into the lions’ cage challenging the beasts to come and have a go if they think they’re cat enough. The animals don’t move until the Tamer rushes in with his whip.

So, a heartbreaker with nerves of steel and a twisted sado-masochistic streak… is this what the Professor wanted to find out? How would a woman born from the human stew of a prostitute, a murderer and the mysterious root vegetable work out?

He’ll soon be able to find out as he finally catches up on his “daughter” after years of searching. He whisks her off to polite society where she plays tennis with Der Vicomte (handsome John Loder out of The First Born) who soon proposes… But, he’s not the only man to have fallen for Alraune and the Professor blackmails her into staying under his “care”.

He's behind you... 

From this point one it’s a battle between the scientist and his creation and we all know how those usually turn out or do we? The film has more than a few tricks and turns up its sleeve … there’s an irony in the impact of the Professor’s own true “nature” on the “nurture” of his subject perhaps?

 Alraune is worth watching purely for Brigitte Helm’s performance alone. I love her physicality and dancer’s contortions: she seems almost too frail to be an evil thing and yet there’s considerable strength behind her movement as the Professor will find out. She has the range too and whilst it’s fun to watch her evil contortions we also see hints of a growing humanity… or do we? Paul Wegener is pretty good too, mad science-ing with consummate abandon and obsessing intensely about his creation, Frankenstein with a mid-life crisis and unrealistic expectations.

But, as with all the very best silent film screenings, it was the mix of film, music – excellent audience! – and, of course this wonderful venue! There’s more to come at the Barbican in the New Year and here’s to more screenings like this!!

Details on the Barbican website!

Duty and sacrifice… Nelson (1918)/Zeebrugge (1924), Cinema No. 6 with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne

In which silent Londoners come down to the seaport in cars, momentarily confuse HMS Warrior with Victory and enjoy a slap-up fish and chips supper between naval adventures.

My cousin Bruce is a Royal Marine, he flies helicopters and has served in Afghanistan and Iraq in his time: a lad from a South Liverpool comprehensive who is now a Colonel and even helped teach a prince how to fly. I say this not just because I’m proud of Bruce but also because it illustrates the enduring opportunities the Royal Navy has offered to people regardless of class: if you have ability you can progress as Lambert and other commentators support, it was possible to advance based on ability even in the more structured society of the late 18^th Century.

Nelson left home to join the navy partly to alleviate the financial pressures on his father as the family struggled after the death of his mother. He was just 14 and far from the finest physical specimen and he even gets invalided out at one point, but nothing can stop his eventual rise. In all of this he is encouraged by his uncle, Captain Suckling, although not to the extent of favours.

Donald Calthorpe is Nelson

This is one of many inspiration themes in Maurice Elvey’s likeable bio-picture made with in the last year of the Great War with inspiration as the aim. But whilst Nelson - or Nelson; The Story of England's Immortal Naval Hero - is certainly propaganda, it takes its facts and its audience very seriously. Nelson’s biography plays out with a minimum of gilded lilies and Elvey shows us major sea battles as forensically as possible with the aid of models, a chalk board and stop-motion ships. 

Elvey is here to salute the positives and is relatively subtle in this work. As Powell and Pressburger were later to show, to make good propaganda, you have to be fair to the opposition: hate isn’t enough especially when compared with pride and the need to do your duty. Here, as in actuality, Nelson’s last words were “thank God I did my duty” and there were more than enough reliable witnesses to his last hours as confirmed by Andrew Lambert in his excellent biography - Nelson: Britannia's God of War.

Nelson's women: Ivy Close as Mrs Nesbitt and Malvina Longfellow as Emma Lady Hamilton

Elevy expert Doctor Lucie Dutton recommended that book and also introduced the film, a significant part of her PhD thesis: Maurice Elvey:  The Development of a British Filmaker During the First World War. Long before filmmakers like Asquith, Mander, Cutts and that fella from Leytonstone proved the British could make decent silent films, Maurice was blazing the trail with forensic historicals such as this one and his amazingly ambitious Life Story of David Lloyd George (still one of my most cherished screenings back at the Barbican with Neil Brand accompanying). 

Lucie has waited a long time for this film to be screened again - as have I - and, having watched it on the BFI Player, I have to say it was so much more splendid on screen. Yes, the film is overly deliberate from time to time and feels limited in comparison to Lloyd George yet, not only was the director on a strict schedule and budget, he also had to re-shoot his scenes aboard HMS Victory and other sequences lost in a fire. To this day, this remains the only time the Nelson story has been filmed on the Victory and Elvey certainly felt a chill filming his main character’s death scene on the actual spot in which he died.

Roll call after the siege of Bastia

The film was a big hit and Lucie read out some reactions from schoolchildren most of whom had been impressed with our hero’s tussle with an unconvincing polar bear… clearly far more impactful for less-jaded eyes.

You can read my more detailed appraisal of the film here – it was a greater film with this screening and South West Silents are to be commended for arranging the weekend of Battleship Silents (Potemkin played on Friday night).

Maurice Elvey

Another feature of live performance is the accompaniment and we were blessed with the fascinating contrapuntal partnership of Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne. The two combined seamlessly on plenty of martial lines but also tripped off into more exotic tones one Nelson was in Egypt, his famous victory over Napoleon proceeded by jazzy rim shots, and excellent combinations from Mr Pyne on timpani and the bass drums. It’s fascinating to watch him work with Stephen Horne and it’s different from say the duo of Horne and Bockius: both percussionists put so much character in their playing. This suits Stephen very well and the next day I was to watch him accompanied by Elizabeth Jane Baldry on Harp… modern silent accompaniment is not just between the artistes and the screen but also between each other and the results are among the most rewarding improvisations you’ll hear anywhere.

Zeebrugge (1924)

We also had Stephen and Martyn accompanying the earlier screening of Zeebrugge (1924) which was a much more focused affair. Made by British Instructional Films (also known later for the films of Walter Summers, such as The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927)) run by Harry Bruce Woolfe whose connections with a military very keen to make “celluloid memorials” celebrating key events of the Great War, explains their quite detailed approach – name checks for VCs and diagrammatic reconstructions, a record of what happened for the millions at home still grieving.

HMS Vindictive for the film

Zeebrugge was made with the consent of the Admiralty as they not only used their ships but also some chilling captured footage from a German U-boat showing allied shipping being sunk, a very uncomfortable watch even from this remove.

The story details the attempt to block the German Submarine base in the Bruges Canal by sinking three old cargo ships. The raid involved a flotilla of battleships led by HMS Vindictive, along with motor patrol baots and, surprisingly, the Mersey ferry boats Royal Iris and Daffodil. I was disappointed that the Royal Iris wasn’t the same vessel that used to ferry me across the Mersey but even so my Grandparents would have been passengers, although my and Colonel Bruce’s Grandad was busy in the middle East and India in the Great War.

The first Royal Iris

The raid was only marginally successful and 227 died with a further 356 injured compared with just 8 killed for the Germans – and yet it still made for a heroic tale for a population still processing the balance of their losses. A.V. Bramble and H. Bruce Woolfe direct very competently and using a mix of animated schematics and convincing live action show the bravery involved whilst also paying tribute to the named personnel who gained VCs and other medals.

It's almost a century since the war ended but we should never take these sacrifices for granted.

It was a grand day out in Portsmouth and an excellent initiative from James Harrison and South West Silents. Silent Portsmouth as a success and the presence of one of the stars nearby was poignant indeed…

HMS Victory

HMS Warrior at sunset

The fault in our Tsars… Mother (1926), Barbican with Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne

“Pudovkin theorised that actors on screen do not really act; it's their context that moves us - something established, through montage, by their relationship to exterior objects.” Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

So, a method driven by process with the director controlling the cinematic context for human reaction by inserting his players into events? That said, this film is crammed full of expressive faces and would be nowhere near as good without the performances, especially the magnificent Vera Baranovskaya: Comrade Pudovkin knew that you can edit all you like but without emotion…  it’s just pictures and pyrotechnics.

Vsevolod Pudovkin, as Sergei Eisentsein, looked back to the failed 1905 Revolution to find brutal injustice the helped inspire the change that was to come in 1917 and, by the mid-twenties, was being consolidated. As with any new regime, it was important to remind people how things came to be and, we must remember that this was the early days of the Soviet Union; a time of optimism for many and not the inevitable failure as viewed through the decedent lens of modern cheap-shot historical judgement.

Communication, travel, industry... all in one frame

This new order followed many decades of struggle against brutal Tsarist rule which had finally taken a Great War in which more Russians were deployed than weapons to force a revolution not just of communists but liberals too. After the February 1917 uprising there was a period of uneasy alliance between the various parties before the Bolsheviks assumed control. There then followed years of civil war and foreign interventions as the European order tried to re-assert itself, then final victory, the death of its inspiration and a power struggle won by a man who would grow into a tyrant…

In 1926, it was still the time to make sense of it all and to remember the way Russian lives had been valued by the old regime. Pudovkin’s Mother stands as one of the pre-eminent examples of contextualising propaganda of the time as well as being a superbly crafted piece of cinema in its own right.  

The story was based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel The Mother and bears similarities to the Bloody Sunday attrocities in which the imperial guard were ordered to open fire on a demonstration in St Petersberg in January 1905. That event led to long-term consequences yet this film is is not a simplistic take on revolutionary innocence versus black-hearted oppression but a tragic story of a nation undermined by a careless, fatal, malaise.

Vera Baranovskaya plays the Mother and she is married to an abusive alcoholic husband Vlasov (Aleksandr Chistyakov), a man who would steal even the family iron if it would get him another vodka. He lashes out at his wife and slaps down their son, Pavel (Nikolai Batalov) as he comes to her aid.

Aleksandr Chistyakov

He is a sad sack of a man who has been defeated by life and in the local tavern he’s an easy mark for a group of men looking for a patsy to help them break an impending strike. The problem is that Pavel is one of the group organising the action. He meets a girl, Anna (Anna Zemtsova) who hands him a package, he goes home and hides it disturbing his sleeping mother just enough for her to see what he is doing.

Come the day of the strike, Pavel and his group are ambushed at the gates of the factory and badly beaten. Pavel and a pal are chased  into the tavern, yet whilst Pabvel makes good his escape his mate is grabbed by the inn-keeper. In the melee his gun is fired and Vlasov is shot dead.

Nikolai Batalov

Our sympathy shifts as the insurgent's mother becomes a widow, staring in vacant horror as her husband is carried lifeless into their rooms. Before long she has discovered what Pavel was hiding, a collection of firearms, and honest citizen that she is, believes the policeman when he promises that if her son only tells the truth he will be free.

The family are now involved in the legal machinery of the Tsarist state and all other considerations are discarded as punishment becomes more important than the crime…

A shock from under the floorboards

“Righteousness, justice, mercy… “ the tribunal sits lazily on the question of Pavel’s life, more concerned with fine horses than the three words they are supposedly guided by. There will be precious little of any today and Pavel is sentenced to hard labour. Incredulous, his mother begs forgiveness – she had no idea that her faith in authority would be so misguided. But she is not alone and soon there is a plan to free Pavel and other prisoners…

Now the film shifts tone and pace as the director drives on towards the family’s ultimate betrayal by their country in an ending possibly inspired by a smuggled copy of East is East. The use of montage is mesmeric, with repeated shots of partly melted ice on the river being juxtaposed with the movement of people towards the prison and then in aid of the rescue: it’s a relentless flow in both cases and very powerful.

“And don’t spare the guns…”

Pudovkiz is so good on the details as well as the scale. As Vlasov’s body lies in death, he focuses on mother, then a dripping tap, then her dead husband, the floorboards, her son and back again: the monotony of grief and despair. There is a rhythm and logical completeness in the way he goes about his story telling and it is perfect for the accompaniment of the Horne/Pyne collective….

The duo sounded more like a quintet with Martin on vibes as well as percussion and Stephen playing his usual array of piano, accordion, flute and sundries… at times their response to Pudovkin’s rapid cuts reminded me of hard-hitting modern jazzers The Bad Plus (known for their covers of The Pixies, Nirvana and Black Sabbath). The duo have developed their counter-play and this film with its revolutionary rhythms is an ideal movie metronome for them to progress their innovative collaboration.

I liked the way Martin’s vibraphone hung notes in the air as the imagery became more fluid only for the beat to strengthen and the music to develop­­­­­­­­­ firmer resolve as the narrative hardened towards the horrific conclusion.

A top notch 35mm print from the BFI was projected and the screen grabs here don’t really do the film justice. It’s available from the Internet Archive and also on cheap import DVD from Amazon or eBay but it surely deserves the same restoration care and attention as many lesser contemporaries.

A statue of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov looks out over his people