Yakov Protazanov was a director from the early Russian cinema, the pre Eisenstein period. He made films in both Tsarist Russia and in the Communist Soviet Union. I have seen three films of him: "Queen of spades" (1916), Aelita, the queen of Mars" (1924) and most recently "Father Sergius".
I watched "Father Sergius" after watching "Night sun" (1990, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), that is an adaptation of the same story by Leo Tolstoy. "Father Sergius" is about a man who tries all his life to become as devout as humanly possible. The exact meaning of the word devout is not exactly clear but it definitely entails getting rid of such things as longing for wealth, status and sexual satisfaction. In order to reach his goal he becomes a hermit. In the end he must conclude that all his attempts have failed.
If I am correct this failure is portrayed differently in the Protazanov and Taviani versions. In the Protazanov version Father Sergius (Ivan Mozzhukhin) sees a farmer's party in a local pub at the end of the film and thinks back at the gala parties at the court of the tsar he attended when he was young. In the Taviani version Father Sergius meets a girl from his former neighbourhood and sees that there is much devoutness in her sober and helpful way of life. In order to become devout one does not need to renounce daily life!
I haven't read the novel of Tolstoy, so I don't know which of the two adaptations is more faithful to this text. I think both endings capture the moral of the story rather well, and except for the ending the two films have more or less the same storyline. All in all the Taviani's remake seems rather superfluous to me.
As said the part of father Sergius is played by Ivan Mozzhukin. He was a big (and wealthy) star in Tsarist Russia, but after the Communist revolution his life was in danger. Under protection of the contra revolutionaries (the White) he fled to Western Europe and continued his film career until his death in 1939.
The way he portrays Father Sergius, especially in the second part of tne movie when Father Sergius is on the brink of madness, has much in common with the way Ivan Cherkasov plays Ivan the Terrible in the two films (1944 but especially 1958) of Sergei Eisenstein. This is remarkable because Ivan the Terrible longed for ever more status and power while Father Sergius on the other hand desperately tried to renounce it.
