The End of St Petersburg

Pudovkin's account of the 1917 Revolution is less celebrated than Eisenstein's October, and will be (for a while at least) than Warren Beatty's Reds. Not entirely without justification, for this is textbook cinema (the film was mapped out in advance, not with a storyboard, but with a kind of 'montage-board') which, unlike October, relies on a prototypical worker hero to embody the soul of the masses. Ironically, it's the power of the images themselves rather than the way they are edited that has kept it alive.