Prostitute (1927 film)

Prostitute
Directed by Oleg Frelikh
Written by E. Demidovich
Noi Galkin
Viktor Shklovsky
Starring Vera Georgiyevna Orlova
Olga Bonus
E. Yarosh
Cinematography N. Winkler
Edited by Esfir Shub
Production
company
Release date
  • 1927 (1927)
Running time
 77 minutes
Country Soviet Union
Language Silent

Prostitute (Russian: Проститутка, translit. Prostitutka) also known as Slayed by Life (Russian: Убитая жизнью, translit. Ubitaya Zhiznyu) is a 1927 Soviet silent drama film directed by Oleg Frelikh.[1][2]

Plot

The film is set in Moscow during the mid 1920s, heyday of the NEP. Some live the high life while others barely survive. A young girl, Lyuba lives with her elderly aunt Barbara. Barbara takes advantage and abuses the girl, and later, "sells" her to a neighbor and kicks her out of the house. But Lyuba does not stay in the street for long, she is sheltered by a random friend who turns out to be a brothel madam. She also imposes a contract of adhesion upon the girl.

Next to aunt Barbara lives the Tyrkin family. Pyotr Tyrkin works for the businessman-butcher Kondratiev. Pyotr's everyday life is well-adjusted. His wife Vera keeps house and raises two young children. Work for the Nepman brings a regular income. But what happens is that Pyotr ends up getting killed when drunk. Left without a livelihood, Vera is forced by the situation to get together with the butcher (the boss of her deceased husband), and then to sell her body.

On the street she meets with the seasoned prostitute Manka who tells about her fate. When Manka worked as a maid, she was seduced by the son of the mistress. After getting kicked out of the house by the mistress for having relations with her son, she became homeless. On the street she came to work at a whorehouse and got a venereal disease which she is still recovering from.

Vera is not able to earn money with prostitution. Both of her children fall seriously ill one after another. In desperation she tries to commit suicide by throwing herself into an ice-hole. But she does not succeed with the attempt and gets rescued. Among the saviors is Lyuba who somehow managed to escape from the brothel and now works in a sewing workshop at a venereal dispensary, and her new boyfriend is Shura who is a member of the Komsomol. But the brothel keeper does not want to just let Lyuba go. She threatens to tell Shura all about her past, but then the teary-eyed girl tells everything herself. Shura sympathizes with her and helps to write a letter to the prosecutor. The police dissolves the den.

Lyuba and Shura are happy. Life is getting better for Vera too because Shura helps her get a job as a railway points operator and her children begin to go the kindergarten. Manka is housed in a venereal hospital.

Interesting Facts

  • "Prostitute" shares the glory of being the first Belarusian feature film together with "Tale of the Woods". Work on the film started earlier and it was also released first in the all-union movie theaters, but "Tale of the Woods" was the one which was first shown in Minsk.[3]
  • Despite the film's success with the audience, the critics of that time did not receive the film too positively, and some saw in it the influence of the "bourgeois pseudo-scientific German films".[3]
  • A circulaire dated 1937 from "Belgoskino" reported to Boris Shumyatsky in Moscow, the head of the main department of the film industry of the USSR about neutralizing "enemy" films. The ban for the film "Prostitute" was motivated by the fact that the film was seen as being "politically incorrect".[3]
  • A significant episode (by the length of the film) is dedicated to the lecture "about the dangers of prostitution and social ways of getting rid of it." The episode was made using animation and extensive statistics available at the time.
  • Titles in the film are simultaneously in Russian, English and Chinese.

References

  1. ↑ "Проститутка (Убитая жизнью). Х/ф". Russia-K.
  2. ↑ Jay Leyda (1960). Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. George Allen & Unwin. p. 272.
  3. 1 2 3 "Проститутка (Убитая жизнью) / Классика белорусского кино из коллекции Госфильмофонда России / Лістапад". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01.

Literature

  • Y. S. Kalashnikov Essays on the history of Soviet cinema: 1917—1934, — Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956.
  • Igor Avdeev, Larisa Zaitseva All Belarus films: catalog-handbook. Feature films (1926—1970). — Minsk: Belaruskaya navuka, 2001. — Volume 1. — 240 pages. — ISBN 985-08-0023-2

Prostitute on IMDb

mubi.com/films/prostitutka

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