The Devil's Wheel

Name: The Devil's Wheel
Director: Leonid Trauberg
Genre: Action, Crime
Released: 1926-03-15
Duration: 40 min
Rating: 5.3
Cast: Pyotr Sobolevsky, Lyudmila Semyonova, Sergei Gerasimov, Emil Gal, Antonio Tserep

Directed by Leonid Trauberg

Action

Crime

19260h 40m5.3

Overview

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.