Boris Barnet Movies
During his heyday in the late '20s and early '30s, Russian actor and filmmaker Boris Barnet was hailed a master of tragicomic satire. Ironically, it would be his use of satire that would put a permanent damper on what promised to be a long, brilliant career.Of English heritage, Barnet was still in his teens when he volunteered to serve as a medic for the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. After completing his military service, Barnet attended the Central Military School of Physical Education of Workers. Following a stint as a professional boxer, Barnet enrolled at VGIK and joined Lev Kuleshov's experimental workshop. Following graduation, Barnet co-directed Miss Mend with Fyodor Otsep in 1926. Barnet made his first solo film the following year. Devushka s Korobkoy starred Anna Sten and gently satirized the government's recently enacted New Economic Policy which allowed a limited amount of free enterprise to boost the Russian economy. Like his subsequent successes, the story offered a subtle blending of tragedy and comedy, much in the style popularized by Charlie Chaplin. Barnet's sophomore effort, a historical epic to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, was assigned to him by the studio and was not nearly as successful as his first. Barnet's disinterest in the subject showed and the film failed at the box office. However, he returned to form with his next effort, Dom na Trubnoi/The House on Trubnaya Square (1928). Audiences loved Barnet's comic take on the complicated relationships among Moscow's dwindling bourgeois society, but some critics warned that such satires could be potentially troublesome for unwary filmmakers. It was advice that Barnet did not heed when he made the sad yet funny Okraina (1933), the story of how the Russian Revolution divided a small Russian community. Though well made, the story was ill-timed and the film was heavily criticized for presenting the Russian people in a negative light. While Barnet never made another real satire, the criticism had a cumulative effect on his career and though he received the title of Honored Artist in 1935, he was never able to regain the popularity and approval he had prior to Okraina. He still continued to make films through the early '60s and a few of them, including U Samogo Sinego Morya/The Bluest of Seas (1935) (one of the Soviet Union's first color films), Podvig Razvedchika/Secret Mission (1947), and Annushka (1959), received good reviews. In 1965, Barnet was working on a film in in Riga, Latvia, when he committed suicide. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- 1951
Russian filmmaker Boris Barnet's Schedroe Leto was released variously in the U.S. as Beautiful Summer and Bountiful Summer. The film was Barnet's first color effort, and a beautiful job it was indeed. Essentially a musical comedy with lightly propagandistic underpinnings, the film offers a rosy-hued look at life in a "typical" Ukrainian collective farm. The largely female cast seemingly can't go for an hour at a time without bursting into song. Somehow, the film finds time for a plot concerning the friendly rivalry between Oksana (M. Bebutova) and Vera (N. Arkhipova), who try to outdo each other in raising livestock and harvesting grain. A romantic subplot involves Vera with mild-mannered bookkeeper Peter (M. Kuznetsov). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Nikolai Kryuchkov, Nina Arkhipova, (more)
- 1947
This Soviet espionage thriller was released in some markets as Secret Agent and The Scout's Exploit. Fedotov (Pavel Kadochnikov) is a WW II-era Russian spy chief. His mission is to steal a packet of valuable documents from a Nazi general. At sake is the future safety of the Ukraine (something that Josef Stalin had not been particularly interested in during the 1920s and 1930s!) Director Boris Barnet shows up in a minor role. When first released in the U.S., Secret Mission was subtitled rather than English-dubbed, limiting its audience appeal. The pervading anti-communist sentiments in America further hurt the film's chances for stateside success. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Pavel Kadochnikov, Viktor Dobrovolsky, (more)
- 1944
Shown as part of the Soviet Retro series at the 2000 Locarno Film Festival, Boris Barnet's 1945 film traces the fortunes of Varia (Irina Radchenko), a young girl who has lost her family to German bombs. Taking shelter with an elderly couple who are soon murdered by the Germans, she becomes a servant to the enemy, who are lead by the commander Balz (director Barnet). With three wounded airmen as her only friends, Varia struggles to survive and eventually helps the airmen to escape. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
- Starring:
- Irina Radchenko, Boris Andreyev, (more)
- 1942
A group of Russian soldiers and local partisans attempt to keep their spirits up and their wits about them in this musical from the Soviet Union. In the far eastern region of the Soviet Union, military forces attempt to ward off German invaders and destroy an Axis airfield that has been built behind nearby enemy lines. Amidst the army's adventures, a French pilot (Viktor Dobrovolsky) happens upon the Soviet encampment, sparking a romance with a local girl (O. Yakunina). Slavnyy Malyy/Novgorodtsy was never released to theaters in the Soviet Union, but it was shown to Russian soldiers at the front during World War II, where it is said to have been enthusiastically received; it was later revived for a retrospective of Soviet Cinema presented as part of the 2000 Locarno Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- E. Grigoryev, O. Yakunina, (more)
- 1935
Oppressed women stand together against their enemies in this historical drama from the Soviet Union. In 1919, a group of Ukrainian women are left to fend for themselves when their husbands go away to fight the White Russian forces. Enemy factions soon seize the village, and the women are put to work in a mine performing back-breaking labor. When the occupation troops are forced to flee the village, they hastily decide to destroy the mine, but the women band together to stop them. With the exception of leading lady Emma Tsesarskaya, the women in the film are actual Ukrainian peasants who had not acted professionally before. Lyubov I Nenavist received only a limited release in 1935, as Soviet authorities felt the characters were not heroic enough, but it was well-received in its screening at a retrospective of Soviet films presented at the 2000 Locarno Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Emma Tsesarskaya, Alexander Chistyakov, (more)
- 1933
The Patriots is set in a Russian provincial village during World War I. Hans Klering plays a German prisoner of war, put to work in the village's cobbler shop. The film takes its sweet time articulating the relationship between the prisoner and his largely benign captors. Patriots is essentially a plea for tolerance; being a Russian film of the 1930s, of course, there are none more tolerant than the Soviets. A bilingual production (Russian and German), The Patriots is available on video in an English-subtitled version. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Sergei Komarov, Yelena Kuzmina, (more)
- 1929
Fedor Ozep, the director of the Russian classic The Queen of Spades, used the occasion of his directing this 1928 German co-production of yet another Tolstoy tale as his means to escape from the Soviet system. In the movie, Fedya Protassov (Vsevolod Pudovkin) is doing everything in his power to free his unhappy wife (Mariya Yakobini) from the bondage of marriage so that she can remarry and finally achieve some measure of happiness in life. Unfortunately, the powerful Russian Orthodox church works hard to make any such arrangement impossible, and in the end the only means by which he can bring this about is to commit suicide. The prints and original musical score to this film were restored and shown once more in 1990. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mariya Yakobini, (more)
Originally Potomak Chingis-khan (The Heir to Genghis Khan), Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia is set in Central Asia in 1920. Valeri Inkijinov plays a young Mongolian trapper ostracized from his village after he is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European trader. Becoming a Soviet partisan, the trapper is thrust into prominence when it is learned that he is descended from Genghis Khan. The occupying English army (identified as the White Russian army in foreign prints of the film, downplaying the West's effort to secure a stronghold in Russia in the years following the revolution) puts the trapper in charge of a puppet Mongolian government. By film's end, however, the "puppet" has cut the strings in a spectacular fashion. "Spectacular" is indeed the appropriate word for this sweeping political drama, which though not a huge success with domestic audiences upon its first release, is now regarded as one of Pudovkin's finest efforts. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- I. Inkizhinov, A. Tchistakov, (more)
- 1928
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
- Starring:
- Vera Maretskaya, Vladimir Fogel, (more)
- 1927
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
- Starring:
- Anna Sten, Ivan Koval-Samborsky, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Igor Ilyinsky, Natalya Glan, (more)
- 1925
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
- Starring:
- Vladimir Fogel, Anatoly Ktorov, (more)
- 1924
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
- Starring:
- Porfiriy Podobed, Boris Barnet, (more)
