Review – The End of St. Petersburg

This film – Pudovkin’s take on the October Revolution – would make an interesting companion piece to Eisenstein’s October, assuming one could endure two over-edited Soviet silent movies in one sitting. My favorite part about this picture was that it was less grandiose than most other cinema treatments of the Russian Revolution (October, Doctor Zhivago and Reds in particular). The plot focuses on a peasant who comes to the city seeking work only to find himself caught up in the turmoil of the times. Before the end, he’s suffered just about every ill experienced by the lower classes: starvation, homelessness, labor riots, military service in World War One, and so on. Though the production is plagued with Soviet propaganda clichés such as the Honest Workers versus the Greedy Capitalists, it still manages at least a little genuine human interest. Mildly amusing