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1-33 of 33
- In the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutiny against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel's officers. The resulting street demonstration in Odessa brings on a police massacre.
- After a run-in with the law, a Mongolian man becomes a fugitive and joins the Russian Civil War.
- During Great Depression, a family is evicted from their apartment and with no other option they move to a tent camp called Kuhle Wampe.
- Mutter Krause and her children live in the poorer section of Berlin's Wedding district. The film depicts the cruelty of poverty and communism as a rescuing force that reaches Mutter Krause and the child too late.
- Young hobos are brought to a new camp to become good Soviet citizens. This camp works without any guards. But crooks kill one of the young people when they try to damage the newly build railroad to that camp.
- A Socialist Realist distortion of Dr. Paul Kammerer's experiments in the inheritance of acquired character(istic)s -- the (not entirely anti-Darwinian) conjecture that certain changes the environment produces in an individual may spontaneously appear in the next generation. As recounted in Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), Kammerer (1880-1926) claimed that darkened footpads he had artificially induced in a toad had been passed on to its offspring. When it was discovered that his critical specimen had been injected with ink (though why and by whom is still unknown), his credibility was destroyed and he apparently suicided. Richard Goldschmidt's synopsis of the film in "Research and Politics," Nature (1949), mocks it as Soviet propaganda in support of the inheritance of acquired characters: The importance attached to the subject is revealed by the facts that none other than the then all-powerful [People's] Commissar for [Public] Education, the highly cultured and intelligent Lunacharsky, is the author of the film, that his wife plays the leading lady and that Lunacharsky, playing himself, appears in one scene.... In a Central European University a young biologist (model Kammerer) is working. He is a great friend of the people and endowed with all the qualities of a Communist movie hero. Working with salamanders, he has succeeded in changing their colour by action of the environment. One day the supreme glory is achieved; the effect is inherited. The bad man of the play, a priest, learns of this, comes to the conclusion that the discovery will spell an end to the power of the Church and the privileged classes, and decides to act. He meets at night in a church... with a young prince of the blood whom he had succeeded in having appointed as assistant to Kammerer. (This is obviously a typical job for a German prince!) Here in the dark sacristy the plot is hatched. The prince (or the priest?) proposes to Kammerer that he announce his glorious discovery at a formal University meeting, and the scientist gladly accepts. During the following night the priest and the prince enter Kammerer's laboratory... open the jar in which the proof specimen of salamander is kept in alcohol, and inject the specimen with ink.... [A]t the University meeting... the young scientist... makes a brilliant speech announcing the final proof for the inheritance of acquired characters.... [Suddenly someone] takes out the salamander, and dips it into a jar of water. All the colour runs out of the specimen. An immense uproar starts and Kammerer is ingloriously kicked out of the University as an impostor. Some time later, we see the poor young scholar walking the streets and begging with an experimental monkey which had followed him into misery. He is completely forgotten until one of his former students... succeeds in finding him, finally, completely down and out, in a miserable attic. She takes the train at once to Moscow and obtains an interview with Lunacharsky..., who gives orders to save the victim of 'bourgeois' persecution. Meanwhile, the character of Kammerer has sunk so low that he decides to make an end of it. The very moment he tries to commit suicide, the Russian student returns with Lunacharsky's message and prevents him from taking his life. The last scene shows a train in which Kammerer and the Russian saviour are riding east and a large streamer reads 'To the land of liberty.'
- A story of a film-making crew traveling in Italy.
- Fjodor Protassow wants to divorce his wife, so that she can be happy with another man. But the church won't allow a divorce, so he fakes his own death, becoming a "living corpse".
- The quest for a sparkling pearl necklace stolen by a beggar under the gaze of a prostitute, who persuades her unemployed friend to steal it back, with tragic consequences.
- An elderly man works as a waiter at a luxurious restaurant. He's content and full of hope, and treasures his family more than anything. But it's time of the First World War and news from the front change his life.
- You said that you love me.
- Soviet expedition to the Pamirs Mountains. In the summer of 1927, Sovkino, together with the Geological Committee, sent an expedition to the little-explored region of Central Asia known as the Pamir (Roof of the World).
- During the Napoleonic era, a German renegade fights against the French invaders and those locals who are friendly to them.
- Von Muller, a member of the fashionable Jockey Club, loses all his fortune, and is indebted on I.O.U. to Lang in a large sum, which he is unable to pay. Going to his room he contemplates suicide when his eye is arrested by a letter, which he opens and finds to be an invitation to a masquerade ball from Franz Oberman, a millionaire, and fellow club member. Von Muller resolves to attend. He dons the costume of a beggar. The ball is at its last ebb when a messenger hands him a note for Lang, reminding him the obligation falls due at midnight. He goes to the conservatory, and is about to end it all, but is intercepted by the host. Oberman tells him he has everything that wealth can give, but he, too, is unhappy. Taking Von Muller to his library. Oberman draws up an assignment of his entire wealth on condition that if after he has gone out into the world a poor man and does not find happiness they shall die together. Von Muller, nothing to lose, agrees, and Oberman goes out to seek employment. He secures employment in a large wholesale warehouse of which he is later made the foreman. Everything progresses nicely with him. He finds happiness in the love of his landlady's daughter to whom he is betrothed. Then a turn comes; a careless driver drops a lighted match, setting fire to the warehouse. Oberman is imprisoned by the flames and in fighting his way falls exhausted. He is rescued and taken to the hospital. His right arm has to be amputated. Later he is discharged from the hospital. Every effort to find employment is futile; no one will employ a one-armed man. He writes a farewell note to his sweetheart, and decides to end it all, but remembering his compact with Von Muller, resolves to enforce its terms. At his old home he learns Von Muller sold the mansion, married and went away. Oberman starts out to find him. At the end of a long day's tramp he seeks shelter in a cheap lodging house. The place is raided. He is arrested as a suspicious character. In the morning he is taken before a Justice of the Peace, and to his surprise he recognizes Von Muller. Oberman demands fulfillment of the contract. Von Muller pleads, saying he has enough money for both, but Oberman is determined. Von Muller secretly presses a button back of him, summoning an officer, whom he orders to take Oberman to a cell. Rushing home, he writes to the other justices, instructing them to release Oberman and to give him 500 francs, which he encloses with the letter. He and his wife then board a steamer bound for abroad. Oberman traces Von Muller to the ship, and succeeds in boarding it. Locating the exact position of Von Muller's stateroom, he lowers himself to the open porthole, and leveling a revolver at the sleeping Von Muller, awakens him and commands him to comply with the terms of the agreement. Terror-stricken, Von Muller takes a revolver, and, pointing it at his own head, fires. With a satisfied grin Oberman drops his pistol, takes a knife from his pocket, and, placing it between his teeth, saws at the rope which holds him up. The rope strains, snaps, then the body plunges down into the raging waters, and is lost to view. In the last scene we see Von Muller in his room at the club. He awakens from a restless sleep, passes his hand over his forehead, and realizes it was all a dream. He resigns from the club and starts a new life.