MOSCOW LAUGHS
(Amkino) What Rudyard Kipling said about East being East and West being West is undoubtedly true. Senses of values are different, ideas of what is funny and what is not funny, for example, do not always coincide between nation and nation. But whatever its faults, the Rus-sian-produced film, "Moscow Laughs," does succeed in being amusing. There is, of course, the inevitable class-conscious-ness even in the humour, but it is not oppressively evident. More might have been made of "Moscow Laughs." The direction is in many places excellent; and if technically the film is not good, the idea behind its production is something that the tech-nically-better films of ‘other countries might use. The women are too much like the person Theda Bara was; there are one or two bits of vamping that are what Graham MacNamee calls "turrific." But this film succeeds in another way. It is highly stylised and, in so being, gives an original, if naive, presentation of the usual situations. The best acting is by a wistful, pretty girl called Aniuta. She is the serving maid who eventually finds happiness with the hero, a good-looking herdsman. Incidentally this fellow gets away with a wild round of slapstick comedy that would lose any Hollywood Lothario his fan-mail for being so undignified and forgetting to turn the correct profile to the camera!
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 21, 17 November 1939, Page 34
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224MOSCOW LAUGHS New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 21, 17 November 1939, Page 34
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