The Diplomatic Pouch

The Diplomatic Pouch (1927)

Сумка дипкур'єра

The Soviet embassy in England sends two couriers with diplomatic mail to Leningrad. The inspector of security police, White, and a group of policemen attack the Soviet diplomatic couriers at night. The documents get to an English trackman, who gives them to his son, a sailor in Portsmouth.

Date of release
1927-02-28
TMDB
4.7 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 12m
Genres
Thriller, Drama, History
Director
Alexander Dovzhenko

Casting

Interesting facts

The Diplomatic Pouch is a 1927 Soviet silent thriller film directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. The first two parts of the film are lost.

Production

Dovzhenko was invited to stage the film because of his knowledge of the diplomatic sphere; he also used to work as a diplomatic courier. Under the influence of the German cinema school, he fills the movie with clichés borrowed from German crime fiction: a brawl in the compartment of an international express train and on its steps, a fight on the deck of the ship, a steamer pursuing the boat, and so on.

At this time, cinematographer Nikolai Kozlovsky introduces Dovzhenko to cropping techniques. The film features images with a lot of unusual angles, night shooting and expressionistic effects (using optical prisms).

Dovzhenko appears on screen, for the only time in his career, as a ship's stoker. In the film there is a scene where inspector White offers money to the stoker, who throws it back into his face. A very similar thing happened in Dovzhenko's life: once a man came to him for an appointment at work, who wanted monetary help because he suffered under the Bolsheviks.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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