The Devil's Wheel

Typically of the heady days of early Soviet cinema, this is constructed according to the fast, sharp editing principles advocated by Eisenstein, complete with symbolic inserts; but in terms of subject matter, it's much less explicitly political than most movies emerging from Russia in the '20s. Chronicling a young sailor's descent into a murky, treacherous underworld of pimps and thieves, after having encountered a Louise Brooks lookalike at a fairground and missed his departing boat, it's a lively moral fable that delights in vivid visual effects and quirky characterisations. If the plot occasionally reveals gaping holes, and the tacked-on ending urging the clearance of the Leningrad slums seems to be rather gratuitous, there's enough going on to keep one attentive and amused.

• Grigori KozintsevDirector
• Leonid TraubergDirector
• Adrian PiotrovskiyWriter

• Pyotr SobolevskyVanya Shorin, Red fleet sailor
• Lyudmila SemyonovaValya
• Sergei GerasimovThe Question Man
• Emil GalKoko, vaudeville performer
• Antonio TserepTavern Owner
• Nikolay GorodnichevHouse manager
• V. LandeCafe dancer
• Sergei MartinsonOrchestra conductor
• Yevgeniy KumeykoHooligan
• I. BerezinHooligan
• Yanina ZheymoHooligan girl
• Tatyana VentselCast