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The Devil's Wheel (1926)

The Devil's Wheel (1926)

Action Crime
Release Date: 1926, March 15
Directors: Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg
Countries: Soviet Union
Production: Lenfilm
Cast: Sergei Martinson, Yanina Zheymo, Lyudmila Semyonova, Andrei Kostrichkin, Viktor Plotnikov, Viktor Chaynikov, Pyotr Sobolevsky, Mikhail Shifman, Nikolay Gorodnichev, Emil Gal, Arnold Arnold, Yevgeniy Kumeyko

Overview:

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.

Keywords:

soviet realism