V Movie Reviews

The last of the three great films that V.I. Pudovkin directed in the 1920s, Storm over Asia (1928) is an acknowledged classic of Soviet silent cinema. Filmed largely on location in Mongolia, the film has an authentic documentary feel, though the story is a stirring melodrama, about a young fur trapper who is mistreated by the occupying forces in the civil war and becomes a leader of the partisans. Pudovkin enjoys caricaturing the foreign (British) troops and the medieval rituals of a Buddhist temple, but it's out on the steppes that he really comes into his own, with panoramic shots of the vast landscapes. Together with Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927), Storm over Asia (also known as The Heir to Genghis Khan) entitles Pudovkin to be ranked with Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as a master of the Soviet montage style, which he expounded in his book Film Technique (1929). --Ed Buscombe

The most fertile period of D.W. Griffith's early career is generously preserved in this special edition of Biograph Shorts. A satisfied actor in early silent films, Griffith was hesitant when the American Biograph company offered him a director's job in 1908, but his first film, "The Adventures of Dollie" (reconstructed here from a Library of Congress paper print), gave Griffith the filmmaking fever, and from 1908 to 1913 he averaged two or three shorts per week, of which these 23 represent a comprehensive sampling. Obscurities mingle with masterpieces on two DVDs; highlights include 1909's "A Corner in Wheat" (which established Griffith's mastery of social realism); "The Musketeers of Pig Alley," a pioneering gangster film shot on authentic New York locations; and "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch," a dynamic early Western.

Although many of these films appear on another compilation (D.W. Griffith: Years of Discovery), important exceptions include 1911's "Enoch Arden" (a prestigious adaptation of Tennyson's poem); "The Usurer," one of Griffith's best films from 1910; "The Last Drop of Water," a grand-scale Western made during Griffith's first trip to California (and an indication of grander films to come); and "His Trust," the first of a two-part serial featuring Griffith's then-common use of blackfaced actors as "noble Negroes." Most important (in addition to early appearances by Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, and other silent stars) is the arc of progress that these films represent. In Griffith's capable hands, we witness "flickers" in their most rapid stage of development, incorporating new techniques (parallel action and cross-cutting, changing camera angles within a scene, dramatic close-ups) from a tireless innovator who would soon rise to the challenge of epic, feature-length productions. --Jeff Shannon

The memoirs of the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky come to pungent life in part 1 of a prewar Soviet trilogy (it was followed by My Apprenticeship and My Universities). Director Mark Donskoy creates the endless hardships of Gorky's adolescence in small, precise scenes, orienting us in the 19th-century "lower depths" of czarist Russia. Refreshingly, the movie has no "great literature" grandness about it, but an abrupt, episodic grit. Dominating Gorky's Dickensian youth are his grandfather, a mean bantam with a fondness for whipping his underlings, and his grandmother, a kindly storyteller (vividly embodied by the goodhearted Varvara Massalitinova). The extraordinary faces of the actors (even in tiny roles) speak volumes about the Russian spirit; it's hard to forget the gypsy laborer who dreams of being a singer, or the little lame boy who keeps a zoo of insects by his bedside. --Robert Horton