The Art Director and Cinematographer are the heroes of this handsome melodrama, set in Russia during the 1917 revolution and told in the typically simplified vocabulary of silent Hollywood. The protagonist is a noble aristocrat, betrothed to a daughter of the Czar but in love with a beautiful commoner sworn the Bolshevik cause. Few couples ever had to face such adversity, and trial follows tribulation in a lively if overwrought fashion. Eisenstein it isn't, but was the October Uprising ever this fun?
I was fortunate to see this rarity on the big screen at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley back in early 1987, alongside the early Edison one-reeler 'The Land Beyond the Sunset' (1912).
I was fortunate to see this rarity on the big screen at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley back in early 1987, alongside the early Edison one-reeler 'The Land Beyond the Sunset' (1912).