Za schastem

This film, "For Luck", by the great director Yevgeni Bauer, involves a love circle, but it's all about sight. Lee, the daughter, has difficulties with psychological blindness. The eyes of the actors advance much of the continuity editing, directing where shots will cut to next. The eyes are also what the actors use most of all for emoting--for expression. Bauer uses fadeouts extensively, as he does in other films, which is associative to Lee's fading sight. I don't know how much of this was intentional, but that's besides the point.

Bauer was a visual director, so it seems appropriate that he'd make a film about seeing. Although, I don't think it's his best work visually (see "After Death" (1915) and "The Dying Swan" (1917)). This was the last film of one of the first masters of the young visual medium, and it's an early picture for one of its next revolutionaries. Lev Kuleshov, who would change cinema forever with his montage experiments, was the production designer for this film and has an acting role as a painter. "For Luck" opens on a lavish set, and you can see the typically high standard of set design and mise-en-scène of Bauer's oeuvre here. The painter character has only a small role in the love circle. One of the best scenes, however, is Kuleshov, as the painter, working as a production designer--as an artist--setting up a scene for a portrait within the film's story and without in making the film. It's the passing of the torch.

Nikolai Radin and Emma Bauer are in love. They've delayed their marriage, because she has a daughter, Tasya Borman. Radin loves her as a daughter. Miss Borman's feelings for him are warmer. Neither of the two older people realize this. They only recognize that her health is bad. So Miss Bauer and Miss Borman head off to the Crimea, where artist Lev Kuleshov really likes her.

It's a pretty good movie, except for the ending, which is over the top. I've gotten used to that in movies directed by Yevgeni Bauer. The acting here is pretty good, with Radin excellent. Kuleshov is a lump. He shows no visible reaction to anything. Still, it's good to have a face put to the name. It's movies like this and his own poor acting, I am convinced, that caused him to look at what other other directors already knew about editing, and appropriate it to general acclaim as the Kuleshov effect: that we judge the emotions of the performers more by the editing than the performance. While I would not slight the importance of editing, a good performer can brings his thoughts and feelings to the audience by how he acts.

Kuleshov spent the rest of his life to genearl acclaim, making movies into the 1940s, spent times in archives destroying pre-revolutionary films, and becoming a big wheel at the Moscow Film School. For these efforts, he was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1967, and died in 1970 at the age of 71.

Although Yevgeni Bauer's fascinating and promising career ended all too prematurely, at least this movie is worthy to have been his last one. Starting with a relatively simple situation, it develops some interesting themes that later prove to be of great importance, and it builds up the emotional tension to the point that it becomes almost too much to bear.

The beginning introduces the three main characters: a wealthy widow, her ailing daughter who is in danger of going blind, and the widow's patient suitor. At the outset, the simple question concerns how much longer the suitor will be willing to wait to get married, since the widow won't do so until her daughter is out of danger. As the story proceeds, the theme of blindness is carefully developed in both its physical and psychological aspects, the kind of parallel that Bauer knew how to establish as well as anyone.

All of the characters are believable, and all of them are worth caring about, making the dramatic tension in their relationships that much greater. Another interesting aspect of the movie is Lev Kuleshov's involvement, both on the production crew and in a small but important role on-screen. Unlike Bauer, Kuleshov still had almost his whole career ahead of him.

It is indeed fortunate that Bauer's movies are finally receiving a little more attention with the recent releases of some of his surviving work. There's no way of telling which direction his career might have taken in the Soviet era, but what does survive is the work of a distinctive, imaginative, and highly skilled film-maker.