Miss Mend (1926)
Posted on December 31, 2009
Filed Under silent films
I’ve not seen anything quite like Miss Mend. This smashing Soviet action trilogy from 1926 was out to prove that the avant-garde USSR of Battleship Potemkin and Man With The Movie Camera could make commercial movies to compete with American gun-symphonies and serials. In the first chapter the villain kills a man by driving him into the path of an onrushing locomotive.
Flicker Alley worked with Turner Entertainment Networks and the Russian state film archives to produce this handsome restoration, and it’s a revelation, an example of canny popular moviemaking almost saucy in its disregard for political polemic. Miss Mend is a stylish, mordant, violent thriller that cheekily stages the vacuous clichés of action melodrama with the straight-faced seriousness of Soviet realism—imagine an Exploits of Elaine shot by Eisenstein. Revolutionary critics were outraged. It was a colossal hit. Read more
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