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| Pudovkin's first feature-length film, an adaptation of Gorky's classic novel of the growth of a woman's political awareness, stars Vera Baranovskaya as the title character. During the revolutionary year of 1905, Niovna-Vlasova is living in poverty, trapped in a hellish marriage to an alcoholic who terrifies her. To keep the alcohol flowing, her husband, Vlasov (Aleksandr Chistyakov), joins a group of strike breakers called the Black Hundreds. Vlasov is unaware that is son, Pavel (Nikolai Batalov), is among a crowd of strikers that he's being paid to harass. During the clash between the conflicting sides, Vlasov is accidentally killed by one of Pavel's friends. When the police arrive to search Pavel's house, his mother turns him over to them, believing that her son's innocence will be quickly proved. Released shortly after Eisenstein's Potemkin, the back-to-back masterpieces of montage immediately put Soviet filmmaking on the map. Zarkhi's screenplay, which extracts the essence from Gorky's looser novel, is brilliantly served by Pudovkin's deft deployment of associative montage and by a performance by Baranovskaya that many critics have ranked among the greatest on film. |
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