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This is one of the most important of the early versions among some 300 adaptations of Verne stories to movies and television that have been produced around the world. To pioneering filmmakers, Verne was a contemporary author of international repute, and his Verne's global reputation was still at its peak. One or two new books had been published annually since 1863, and even after Verne's death in 1905, posthumously issued works continued to appear regularly, with the last original book published in 1919.

Verne also knew the power of his novels off the printed page. Verne was also an active playwright, who had adapted such novels as Around the World in 80 Days and Michael Strogoff into phenomenally popular stage productions. Indeed, Verne had predicted the invention of motion pictures in his 1888 novel, The Castle in the Carpathians. Even before Verne's 1905 death, he was probably aware that his stories were proving a source of inspiration for the new medium of motion pictures; several adaptations had already appeared in France. One of the early filmmakers to tackle Verne stories was none other than the writer's son, Michel Verne, who, after his father's death filmed six of his novels in France.

Michael Strogoff was one of Verne's best known stories to readers and theater-goers at the dawn of the 20th century. The 1876 novel had been translated into some 20 languages, including Chinese and Japanese. The first three film versions, in 1908, 1910, and 1914, were made in the United States.

When the story was next brought to the screen, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, it had acquired distinct political implications. The novel Michael Strogoff had been originally subtitled Courier of the Czar. In the mid-1920s, a story of Czarist Russia by a French writer seemed a perfect film production for a community of white Russian filmmakers, exiled from their homeland and working together in France. The prospective star of MICHEL STROGOFF, Ivan Mozhukin, had been the most popular screen star in Russian films of the Czarist era, and had since won acclaim from French audiences. Mosjoukine wrote the adaptation of Verne's story in collaboration with director Viatcheslav Tourjansky and writer Boris De Fast, who also plays the role of Feofar Khan.

Production of MICHEL STROGOFF lasted nearly a year, traveling to Norway for the Siberian exteriors and shooting the battle scenes with over 6000 soldiers of the Latvian army and cavalry. The adaptation followed the novel more closely than any other of the other screen adaptations before or since. Thanks to its scale and enormous popular success, MICHEL STROGOFF was distributed in many countries. In the United States it was imported by Universal Pictures, who, however, cut nearly an hour from its length.

Ten years after this version, producer Joseph Ermolieff, another member of the white Russian film-making community, filmed a series of versions of Michael Strogoff in France, Germany, the United States, and Mexico. The director of the 1926 version, Tourjansky, returned to the subject again in 1961 with THE TRIUMPH OF MICHAEL STROGOFF starring Curt Jurgens, a sequel to a version of the original novel made in 1956 with Jurgens.

In both of Tourjansky's versions, in 1926 and 1961, he treats Strogoff's journey with an epic sensibility as a tribute to the glory of Czarist Russia. The Czar and his people are shown to be bound together in mutual devotion to the motherland. The concept of class so central to communist thinking in the Soviet Union of the 1920s is completely denied in MICHEL STROGOFF, portraying Czar and peasant as a single entity thinking and behaving alike. Class distinctions are shown to be fluid by the hero's own evolution, and his romance with Nadia.

Consequently, for over forty years after the Russian Revolution, exiled white Russian filmmakers in Europe and in the United States made a series of six films of Verne's novel of the adventures of the Czar's courier. Finally, a 1971 version directed by Eriprando Visconti offered a leftist response utilizing a Socialist perspective on the Verne narrative.

For years, the 1926 version of MICHEL STROGOFF was believed to be nearly lost, and only a three-reel 9.5 mm. Pathescope version for home distribution seemed to survive. However, in 1988, the Cinémathèque Français restored the entire full-length original French version, in all of its colors and tints. It was first shown theatrically in the United States in 1997, but has yet to be widely seen.