Raoul Walksh was never a favourite of mine, I often found his pictures revolting in character and almost inhuman, and this is a particularly disturbing story but the more important for its ruthless realism. It deals with prostitution in tzarist Russia the year before the first world war, it exposes an abyss of social problems and abuse, as the main character Marya Kalish (Elissa Landi) and her family are Jewish and exposed to the tzar's pogroms. Her father ends up in jail and is placed in a dungeon in St. Petersburg, where he gets ill, and the only way for his only daughter to visit him is to acquire a "yellow ticket", a passport for prostitutes, which allows them to go around everywhere, while they have to regularly report to the police. She only avails herself of the ticket to visit her father and never works as a prostitute, although she is troubled enough especially by militaries and Lionel Barrymore as the abominable chief of police. In a critical moment Laurence Olivier as nothing less than a downright Englishman appears as a newspaper man to save her from even worse troubles to come. The finale is tremendous in its chaotic scenes of the outbreak of the war, but it is a good story efficiently told and extremely interesting for its exposure of the conditions of prostitutes in the Russia before the wars, - that only made everything even worse in Russia.
Review of The Yellow Ticket
The Yellow Ticket
(1931)
Laurence Olivier to the rescue of a Jewish Russian in distress
11 October 2019