L'express bleu

Genre film from the era of the great Soviet classics: a mixture of magnificent shots, desperate lack of rhythm, the expected class struggle passed through the sovietic filter, and the inevitable montage games that Eisenstein put into fashion.

I decided to see it precisely because it was mentioned by Eisenstein as a precursor to Sternberg's Shanghai Express, but the truth is that one gets tired of seeing the typical rapid succession of shots of the same thing from different angles, as if showing a statue or a handshake in a simple 6-second shot had to be fragmented into shorter shots from the front, from the side, from above, from below to capture our interest.

It all sounds like a lesson badly learned or following a manual without really knowing how or why.

There are some interestingly filmed fights, and some very careful lighting in some scenes, but overall the movie is pretty boring and routine.

If we want to get to know the Soviet genre cinema, it is better to forget about this film and watch the magnificent comedies and adventure films of Boris Barnet and Abraam Room.

It's a pity that this rousing adventure piece - with Euro villains - has disappeared from repertory. It really is the grandfather of all train adventure movies and with the (English?) officer moving along the carriage roofs between his privileged lot, the uninvolved Asian bourgeoisie and the coolies in working class struggle, as the proto Peking Express speeds along. The then politically correct take on the colonial powers is a match for Pudovkin's STORM OVER ASIA and he did a British tour saying how sorry he was about that one.

Particularly with the Meisel score, this is a whole lot more approachable than the so called classics.

It's China. After a third of the movie showing the suffering of the poor in famine, a well guarded British diplomat boards the train to confer with the dictator. He pledges to work for peace, while images of battleships and similar implements of war flash across the screen. That settled, he heads to his room and his Chinese mistress. But one of the Europeans on board is dead. One of the poor Chinese is arrested. This triggers a revolution.

With a starting title "Episode of the Revolutionary movement in the East", I can't say that this movie does not wear its colors proudly. There is certainly no subtlety in any of the images or attitudes. Westerns are bad, dictators are bad, people who are accused of murder are great when they're poor. The editing, in the Academician style, is brisk and staccato. There seems to be an almost sexual component to the images of heavy machinery like the locomotive, common to many of the Soviet movies of this period; the industrialization of the Soviet Union at any cost was a basic plank in the governmental platform. But for a movie that was more than an hour on release (and is still 57 minutes long in the copy I looked at), there's nothing but the basic pounding message; something this length needs more than one point. Eisenstein claimed that Von Steinberg based Shanghai Express on this. Sheer aggrandizement.