L'infanzia di Gorki

A good-looking memoir whose nostalgia for the days of the Tsar is tempered by visits from the Secret Police and scenes of prisoners being lead to the Gulag (luckily a thing of the past by the late thirties!), punctuated by beautiful shots of Mother Russia...

The resemblance between Alexander Lyarsky as the young Alexei (as he is called in the film - a role he also plays in the next part of the trilogy - and his illustrious subject at that age has been well captured in the Russian style, as one would expect. That Lyarsky died during the German occupation sadly also doesn't come as a surprise...