Vladimir Fogel Movies

This engaging comedy of manners from celebrated Soviet director Boris Barnet finds a young peasant woman (Vera Maretskaya) traveling to Moscow to start a new life. She takes a job as a servant for a oily barber and his wife who live in a crowded tenement. Satirical jabs are taken at bourgeois society and urban problems like labor-union parades, housing shortages, and the crowded conditions of the city. The House On Trubnaya Square was one of the most important Soviet films of the 1920s but was not viewed by western audiences until 60 years after it was released. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

In this silent Russian film, an underhanded boss pays an impoverished employee with a lottery ticket instead of the money she earned. However, when the ticket turns out to be a winner, the greedy man struggles to get it back. ~ Iotis Erlewine, Rovi

Russian writer/director Abram Room never again made anything as good--or as highly individual--as his 1927 silent film Bed and Sofa. In this one-of-a-kind satire of the Moscow housing shortage, a married construction worker invites an old pal to stay with him. The friend not only accepts the worker's hospitality, but the favors of his wife as well. Impregnated, the wife tires of being a pawn for two rampaging male libidos and leaves both men, seeking a new life of her own. Bed and Sofa is also known as The Third Meschanskaya. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

As co-directed by Fedor Ozep and Boris Barnet, the 1926 Russian silent picture Miss Mend (also known as The Adventures of the Three Reporters) constitutes an epic-length saga adapted from a 1923 pulp novel. The original work credits the author as an American, "Jim Dollar" though this was actually a pseudonym for a Russian woman, Marietta Shaginian). The film embodied a local response against the experimental cinema of Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, and an attempt to emulate fast-paced American serials featuring such stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Pearl White. The story, partially set in an imagined America dominated by cutting-edge technology and new social structures, comments on such issues as wealth, violence, racism and rape, in its tale of Vivian Mend, an urban professional who earns a living and raises her only child sans the help of any man, and three reporters who attempt to stop a biological attack on the U.S.S.R. by several unsavory Western industrialists. This set contains the surviving four hours of footage from the original serial, newly remastered and restored by David Shepard. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Though not his first film, Russian director/cinema theorist V. I. Pudovkin's Chess Fever (Shakhmatanya goryachka) was the first to be released. Essentially a comedy, this 2-reel exercise in montage manages to make the game of chess seem thoroughly cinematic. Illustrating his theory that "The foundation of film art is editing", Pudovkin uses apparently unrelated images to fashion a smooth, well-integrated unified whole. He goes so far as to rabbet in shots of legendary chess master Capablanca so that his film will have a "star". Chess Fever was but a prologue for the Pudovkin masterpieces to come: Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (1928). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this satire of Ugly American attitudes, a U.S. traveler in Russia finds that few of his stereotyped preconceptions match up with any reality. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi