Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Cigarette Girl of Mosselprom (1924)

A young cigarette vendor (Yuliya Solntseva) meets an American businessman in the Mosselprom district of Moscow. An office clerk (Igor Ilinskii) is smitten with the cigarette girl, buying a pack a day from her although he doesn’t smoke. A motion picture troupe comes to shoot on location on the cigarette girl’s street. Latugin the cameraman (N.M. Tseretelli, the engineer of Aelita) becomes fixated upon her, convincing his studio to add the cigarette girl to the cast.

The American businessman, Oliver MacBright (M. Tsibulskii), visits the studio and expresses a desire to invest in a motion picture production. The film director has Latugin removed from his production unit and assigned to the shooting of MacBright’s film on life in Moscow. When the documentary is screened for MacBright and the studio executives, it is a love poem not to Moscow but to the cigarette girl. When footage of Zina and Latugin kissing together is revealed, they are discharged.

The clerk is soon employed as MacBright’s secretary and discovers a letter from Zina offering to become a kept woman. Latugin ekes a living from being a street photographer. All the while, MacBright and Zina are brashly spend money on frivolities. The clerk and Latugin orbit around Zina, only to be rebuked by her for their constant intrusions into her life. MacBright proposes (through the misinterpreting clerk) and Zina flatly turns him down.

The film is a circle of life story with the apparent moral being that there is nothing but heartache in chasing your dreams — instead, be happy with what life has given you. In step with a Soviet audience’s expectations of their films in the silent era, this comedy feature is not wholly a comedy. There is a surging undercurrent of unstable life circumstances and loss. It is far more about errant assumptions and the pain they cause than it is about love and lightness. The production itself is a series of episodic sequences rather than a flowing narrative, and a detailed synopsis of the film reads as disjointed and illogical. Latugin’s film-within-film documentary foretells of the whole production’s film-within-film framework. And you thought The Player was an original idea.

Igor Ilinskii is the mugging comedian of the film — something of a Jerry Lewis in an Ingmar Bergman film. He given a few opportunities to cut loose and Ilinskii takes them to buffoonish extremes. As would be expected, the American businessman is occasionally the source of slapstick comedy — as when he examines the fallen clerk for signs of life (should we be watching this?) — but chiefly he is shown to be an aloof, excessive and corrupting antagonist.

The production is replete with wonderful shots of the streets of Moscow with its grand and detailed architecture. Also, as a sidebar, the behind-the-scenes view of film production at the Mezhrabpom-Rus’ studio in Moscow raises the bewildering questions as to why certain things are being done on-screen, such as spraying the cinema lights with a liquid mist before shooting.

— Carl Bennett