La ragazza con la cappelliera

Natasha (Anna Sten) is a hat maker whose employer Madame Irene (Serafima Birman) is in trouble with the housing committee for falsely claiming that Natasha is renting a room from her. However when Natasha meets a young peasant called Ilya (Ivan Koval-Samborsky) and is then given a winning lottery ticket everything changes. Written by Valentin Turkin and Vadim Shershenevich, and directed by Boris Barnet this 1927 Soviet Russian silent feature film was made to promote the state loan and is an at times slapstick comedy set in a rather capitalist seeming Russia. One of Barnet's earliest films it has Moscow locations (cold looking ones) and an amusing performance from Pavel Pol as Madame Irene's money grubbing husband.

I have been lately surveying silent film for two major reasons. One is looking to see cinema when it was still new, before all manner of rules and shorthands were in place. The distance between life and movies was much shorter, for one, far less complicated, which means you get to see very transparent workings.

Take this for example. Reviewers have it noted as an early riff on screwball comedy plus slapstick sweetness from Chaplin, with no bearing whatsoever to Eisenstein and the likes, nary an outspoken prole or montage in sight.

Then note again a much more subtle class conflict than anyone else from Kuleshov's film workshop at VGIK envisioned. Two adjacent rooms in the same house, one leased by the well-to-do couple who own the house to a poor girl from the countryside selling hats, who in turn agrees out of pity to be the mock wife to an itinerant bum just to shelter him from the cold. Money drives the world. A feudal relationship exists in essence between the two rooms. The girl is busy working on hats, while the couple mooch off her efforts because they have a place to sell. Authorities come knocking on the door, tax-collectors, the house committee, and are met with cunning wit and deception.

The main gag in the finale is that the husband of the couple bought the lottery ticket standing to win a small fortune but has given it to the hatbox girl.

The scene where he finds out is marvellously rendered as visual radio, with the listener tuning into different excerpts of films. These days he would be shown watching TV. A similar - more sophisticated - scene exists in L'Herbier's superb L'Inhumaine from 1924. My guess is the film was studied at VGIK.

The other reason I've been delving into these films, is for a window in time that sharpens perception. Because silent film portrays a world a little damp and sunless after centuries of cinematic prehistory, caught suddenly in the light of the camera, and really seen for the first time as it prepares to lunge forward from the precipice, so both antiquated and modern at the same time, you get the strange effect of reality in the process. My pet project with these is to see not old times feted in history then, but a modern, contemporary world out the window. Here, it's Moscow as was not often depicted by the Soviets, not completely gloomy and downtrodden, or caught in revolutionary frenzy. Some life going on basically. Also very precious in this regard are Vertov's Kino-Pravda reels.

One more reason to see this is for the brief experiment with synchronous sound.

As it happens with his compatriot Evgenii Bauer, Barnet is one of the most unknown and great Russian filmmakers. Of course he passed several seasons in hell, because of the "stalinism" but the average quality of a quite long career is high enough to consider him a master. This is his funniest movie, a delightful, almost screwball comedy played with that old charm and grace that only in silent cinema you can find. Far from politics, socialism and - the great mother Russia that will grow us all- "The girl..." follows the traces of DeMille, La Cava and Lubitsch. Moscow seems even a great city to live, with his problems, but human. Some hilarious moments and laughs assured. Marvellous feature

This movie is really cute. Unfortunately, that adjective has a rather derogatory connotation, especially when referring to a work of art. I certainly don't mean it that way. Frankly, I could use a little delight of the sort The Girl with the Hat Box provided me. It's an utterly charming story about a young girl who makes hats. The comedy of errors is complicated, and is not worth telling in whole.

Anna Sten stars in the lead. Does that name ring any bells? Well, I didn't recognize the name, but I clicked on it and read up on her. Apparently Samuel Goldwyn brought her over to the United States (surely based on her performance in Hat Box) to be the next Garbo in the early 1930s. She starred in Nana (Dorothy Arzner & George Fitzmaurice, 1934), We Live Again (Rouben Mamoulien, 1934; also starring Frederic March), and The Wedding Night (King Vidor, 1935, and she starred opposite Gary Cooper). All were enormous bombs, each more astronomical than the last. Afterwards, she appeared in several more Hollywood films in secondary roles. I really, really want to see any of her Hollywood films to see what her problem was. You'd never know there was one from The Girl with the Hat Box. She's gorgeous, charming, and very funny.

The male lead is played, also delightfully, by Ivan Koval-Samborsky, who had a major role in 1926's Mother by Pudovkin. He plays a homeless student whom Sten at first pities and tries to help, but they soon find love in each other. The villains in the film are played by Serafima Birman and P. Paul. They are both exceptional. The latter doesn't seem to have any other film credits, but the former later played Efrosinia, Ivan the Terrible's aunt in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible movies. I didn't recognize her, as this was 18 years earlier. Plus, in Ivan she is always covered in huge robes. But you can recognize her from the nose.

I'm sure there are probably tons of Russian comedies, but for some reason it seems like most of the Russian movies that have achieved any kind of fame in the US are very heavy and serious, and usually fatalistic. Eisenstein had a great sense of fun, and his films often contain comedic scenes, but they tend to be high-minded and serious overall. I'm pretty sure the Girl with the Hat Box is the first pure Russian comedy I've ever seen. I loved it.

The story and the characters were extremely charming. Anna Sten was beautiful. The baddies were more comical than they were truly evil. And everything turns out happily in the end. It could have almost been a Hollywood movie, except the photography is better.

I'd like to see more Russian comedies.

9/10