The Devil's Wheel (1926) — action, crime film. Directed by Leonid Trauberg, Grigori Kozintsev. Starring Pyotr Sobolevsky, Lyudmila Semyonova, Sergei Gerasimov, Emil Gal.
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A sailor's moral journey from accidental desertion to redemption through surrender and integrity.
Action, Crime · 5.7/10 · 40 min · 1926
Typically of the heady days of early Soviet cinema, this is constructed according to the fast, sharp editing principles advocated by Eisenstein, complete with symbolic inserts; but in terms of subject matter, it's much less explicitly political than most movies emerging from Russia in the '20s. Chronicling a young sailor's descent into a murky, treacherous underworld of pimps and thieves, after having encountered a Louise Brooks lookalike at a fairground and missed his departing boat, it's a lively moral fable that delights in vivid visual effects and quirky characterisations. If the plot occasionally reveals gaping holes, and the tacked-on ending urging the clearance of the Leningrad slums seems to be rather gratuitous, there's enough going on to keep one attentive and amused.
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Related entry on Wikidata (Q3212458), public domain (CC0).