Posledneiye tango

Ossip Runitsch and Vera Kholodnaya dance the tango in a dirty saloon in sunny Argentina. One day, Runitsch decides that his sweetie and he will rob the rich Ivan Khudoleyev, which involves her sitting down at his table: but beware liking him, lest they switch from the tango to an Apache!

Noel Coward may have sung about Nina from Argentina and her distaste for the tango, but this ten-minute fragment hints at some good reasons for others to avoid that dance, with its intimations that it's going to turn out that Joe and Chloe (which seem to rhyme in Argentina, or at least in this Russian version of Argentina) are going to turn out to be like Frankie and Johnny. At any rate, it looks like a burlesque of some dance-inspired tragedy to me. On the other hand, it might have been deadly serious and it's only my sense of the ridiculous that makes it seem so. It's hard to tell with only ten minutes of a work whose original length is unknown, but might have been as long as GREED before editors and time got to it.