Miss Mend

Miss Mend (1926) is a Soviet serial, modeled after audience-pleasing American and German crime films.  It is immensely long, 4 and 1/2 hours, and rather sloppy in its execution, although the picture has some engaging sequences.  I can't recommend this film to anyone except silent movie enthusiasts or cinephiles with an interest in Soviet-era films.  Unlike the American serials that I saw as a child in small-town movie theaters, Miss Mend is elaborately produced and has impressive sets and first-rate acting.  French serials by Louis Feuillade established a genre intended be shown in two-reel installments; American serials followed the same pattern. But Miss Mend seems to derive from the colossal films made by UFA in Berlin, specifically Fritz Lang's first Mabuse film, shown in two ninety minutes parts, and Joe May'sThe Indian Tomb (on which Lang also worked) constructed according to the same principal.  Miss Mend is divided into three parts, each ninety minutes long.  The story involves a plucky secretary named Vivien Mend who stumbles into a conspiracy to destroy the Bolshevik revolution directed from an American factory town by an evil oligarch, Alexander Stern, and his henchman, Chiche.  The first two hours of the film are ostensibly set in the United States although the movie, on the appearance of its locations, seems to have been shot in Odessa or some other Black Sea city.  The film is not particularly fast-moving although it begins with a bravura sequence, a strike at an American factory put down by mobs of Keystone Kop police who end up in a slapstick pursuit of Miss Mend, a supporter of the strikers, and her three admirers, Hopkins, Fogel, and Barnet.  While attempting to elude the inept army of cops, Miss Mend hitches a ride with the mysterious Stern, a capitalist and plutocrat, involved in the plot to destabilize the Bolshevik regime.  Miss Mend doesn't know that Stern is a villain and seems to be in love with him.  Stern lives in a huge mansion filled with ornate carved furniture and suits of armor conveniently located so that the trio of Miss Mend's allies can conceal themselves in them.  The first ninety minutes of the film involves a disputed will.  The elder Stern, who may be alive or dead or both like Schroedinger's cat (he is comatose in a casket but keeps emerging from time to time) is claimed to have been killed abroad by Bolsheviks.  The bad guys have substituted a forged Will for Stern's actual testament providing that his fortune will be paid to a shadowy criminal "Organization" dedicated to destroying Bolshevism.  There is some effectively macabre stuff about the dead man who keeps appearing as a corpse or revenant -- he looks convincingly dead and, indeed, half-decayed and his ontological status is never explained.   In the second installment of the serial, the action shifts to Russia.  The Organization has sent Stern to Moscow carrying deadly bacteria in ampules that he intends to affix to broadcasting antennae in Russia and, somehow, it seems disseminate with the radio waves -- the science in this film doesn't make any sense at all.  There is a clumsy subplot about a child in Miss Mend's care kidnapped by the villains.  The child is murdered but no one seems to pay much attention to this development. Miss Mend and her three side-kicks travel to Russian to prevent Stern from committing his attack on the Bolsheviks with the biological weapon of mass destruction.  Although most of the picture is lack-luster, a number of scenes have a grim power -- the sequence showing men and women dying from the plague on the ship in the Russian harbor is scary and there are some effective brawls.  Vivian Mend is played by Natalia Glan and she is the best thing in the movie.  Glan moves like a ballerina, an important asset because the film involves lots of climbing, jumping and running.  Glan has a long equine face with protruding worried-looking eyes and a flare of black hair on both sides of her head that gives her a Futurist-look -- the hair is like the wings on The Flash's mask, fins that suggest that she is always in fast motion.  At first, Glan is unprepossessing and seems too homely for the film but she grows on you and, in fact, is one of those rare actresses who can seem both supernaturally beautiful and very plain and down-to-earth in almost the same shot.  Her admirers are foppish dandies, ostensibly journalists and cameramen working for a newspaper -- they are rivals for Miss Mend's affections, although she pays them little or no heed.  Boris Barnet, himself an important Soviet director, plays one of the men and is the romantic lead in the film, a handsome fellow who looks like a Hollywood matinee idol.  The directors of the film (Barnet is one) are excessively enamoured with the Kuleshov effect -- they cut scenes together in a haphazard way and don't care much about continuity.  Indeed, most of the action scenes are marred by the fact that they don't take place in any convincing topography -- the actors often seem strangely isolated from one another.  The film is like Lang's first Mabuse picture:  it has many interesting faces and features very large sets vertically proportioned since the films' visual aspect is pillar-boxed.  But the film seems slow-paced for this genre and is negligently constructed -- it seems to have a modern Hollywood director's contempt for the audience's intelligence.  (In an early scene, a gun is brandished in a bar fight in a wharfside dive.  A black stevedore is shot and left dead on the floor.  When the authorities arrive, someone asks if anyone was hurt.  "No, only a Negro has been killed.  But that doesn't matter."  At least so an intertitle informs us.  A reminder that Black lives didn't matter back in those days -- at least, in the Soviet interpretation of American society.)