A Russian aristocrat and his servant girl escape to Turkey during the revolution.A Russian aristocrat and his servant girl escape to Turkey during the revolution.A Russian aristocrat and his servant girl escape to Turkey during the revolution.
Richard Alexander
- Pyotyr
- (uncredited)
Hadji Ali
- Turkish Landlord
- (uncredited)
Mischa Auer
- Sergei
- (uncredited)
Mae Busch
- French Wedding Witness
- (uncredited)
Jack Chefe
- Nightclub Guest
- (uncredited)
Harry Cording
- Revolutionary
- (uncredited)
Earle Foxe
- Boris - Soldier
- (uncredited)
Betty Gillette
- Girl
- (uncredited)
Alphonse Kohlmar
- Orthodox Priest
- (uncredited)
Lee Kohlmar
- German Tailor
- (uncredited)
Arnold Korff
- Kalin
- (uncredited)
William Le Maire
- Revolutionary
- (uncredited)
Ivan Linow
- Ivan
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaAlthough the onscreen credits list the writing source as a novel, no record of its publication has been found.
- SoundtracksLove Theme
(1932) (uncredited)
Music by Harry Warren
Played during and after the wedding ceremony, and often as the love theme for Nikita and Tanyusha
Featured review
Hollywood lost in the chaos of the Russian revolution
This is a typical Russian Revolution film, with all the chaos, the dreadful muddle, the constant introduction of new characters and their sudden disappearance, the reckless atrocities galore, the helpless people being most of them martyred and lost in anonymity in the whirling mass movements and the unfathomable pathos. Douglas Fairbanks Jr is a Russian aristocrat in the army who quickly has to change sides when the revolution comes and manages to escape all the way to Constantinople with a former servant girl, whom he marries, but other old female friends and mistresses turn up in Constantinople offering an alternative life, which he sacrifices for his love, and so on - there is no end to intrigues and adventures here, but they all crowd upon each other, leaving no space to breathe. The film is compressed into only 57 minutes while the original was twenty minutes longer, but it was still the pre-Code period, so those twenty minutes were probably cut away when the Code was established like a devastating censure for so many films. What strikes you here is the extremely competent direction by William Dieterle, the virtuoso acting by everyone (even Misha Auer turns up in a small part), the splendid camera work as early as 1932 and the impressing cinematography, accompanied by music that could fit Doctor Zhivago by Milan Roder, totally unknown and forgotten today. In brief, this is a gem of the early thirties not to be brushed aside but rather to be advanced and elevated in spite of its brevity to the rank of other classics of the same kind, like Sternberg's "The Last Command" and "Shanghai Express", Raoul Walsh's "The Yellow Ticket", Michael Curtiz' "British Agent", Jacques Feyder's "Knight Without Armour" and other heroic efforts to put the Russian revolution on screen, which all must be insufficient but which all at least give some impression of what that great human disaster for all civilization was all about.
helpful•11
- clanciai
- Oct 1, 2020
Details
- Runtime58 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1
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