The House on Trubnaya

This is the greatest movie by Barnet, an ex-actor and boxer who made several of the freshest and most entertaining Soviet films of the 1920s. The plot hinges on a petit bourgeois hairdresser (hilariously caricatured by Fogel) who tries to hire a non-union housemaid; but the film's pleasures are less in the writing than in the try-anything-once attitude to film form, and the agile camerawork, which cranes up and down a crowded tenement and roams the streets of Moscow. It has much the same spontaneity that the early Godard films had, plus it's a whole lot funnier. A bona fide classic.