Miss Mend (1926)
Directed by Fyodor Otsep, Boris Barnet
In Miss Mend (1926), Russian Fyodor Otsep and director/star Boris Barnet’s 3-part (4-hours 10) towering ripper, is to see all walks of the silent serial and feature films up to that point converging into one explosive Epic: the raw American directness and kinetics, the Louis Feuillade-ish everyday criminal underworld of Les Vampires with a political edge, weapons of mass destruction, the fringe of Russian montage intensity, grandiose Germanic angular photography, Dr. Mabuse criminal networks, Robert Wiene, Paul Leni, and FW Murnau Expressionist horror, and silent movie comics everywhere. All that’s left out are the Italian superproductions, if just in canvas. It is perhaps the only of its kind.
Taken whole, in one sitting as I saw it for 2023 National Silent Movie Day, it's all quite overwhelming. Pistons are firing relentlessly, with dramatic momentum swinging both ways in its near unlimited action, while even some avant-garde techniques are part of its toolkit. Some scenes saturate themselves with genre conventions on purpose, which filmmakers and audiences even then were aware of their own, to a petardist overload, which is cathartic, ridiculous, and resolutely strange. In the first episode, a character dies 3 times and resurrects each.
There are opposed, but cooperative, cautionary threads in Miss Mend. “Soviet Americanism”, the then in-style Russian love for the American Fantasy —that which NYC and Hollywood were the main gateways— and their social criticisms of America akin to racial discrimination and capitalist temptations are sutured to the story. Though this is never a major subject nor is it emphasized, it remains undercurrent, even while it eventually veers into science fiction. These events exist at times as moments of parody and other tiny detours. At the start of part 1 there is a large factory strike scene, sabotaged and turned violent by capitalist implants. During a fight in an American jazz bar, a black worker is murdered, and the other employees dignify him by removing their hats, and covering him with a sheet. A policeman approaches the body, removes the sheet, and says flippantly, "No big deal, he's black." There is a similar attention given to a Chinese laundry in this way, though more visually, by a clear division of wealth. When the Americans go to Leningrad in pursuit, they are denied the victory over the villains by their hands, as they are opportunists, uncaring of Russian issues.
Miss Mend and her squad three, which includes director Barnet himself, all are at a high level of physical cursive, their articulations of the body, and highly expressive each in their catalogue ways. Tom Hopkins (Igor Ilyinski) especially, with his Chaplinisms and 100s of tiny readjustments. The main adversary, Chiche (Sergei Komarov), and the other villains are grotesque and ghoulish, with a suggestion that they are half monster, and this is reflected in their acting styles: rigid, angular, mechanical, marionette, mired by disease. The character of George Stern (Ivan Koval-Samborskyi) sits in the middle. In the beginning he shares the relaxed, more natural acting of the heroes, but as time goes on and the deeper he sinks into corruption, this style changes more alike the villains.
As an attempt to please large audiences, with a fusion of Russia through the then popular prism of America, and both moviemaking traditions, USSR and Hollywood, the love of cinema, it is more than successful. It tanked critically on release, and it is rarely, if ever, screened, or even talked about any place as far I’m aware. Which is sad; it very emotionally accessible, and more fun than you could ever want.
Currently, Miss Mend is only available on DVD from Flicker Alley or Amazon.