Shot cheerfully in the streets, The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom has the freshness of the American silent comedies and the intelligent inanity characteristic of the Russian Eccentrics: it makes its points physically with a brilliant use of shots, props, and postures. An iris frame introduces Yuliya Solntseva, with her Aelita eyes, as the eponymous tobacco vendor who unwittingly attracts the love of three men: a hapless scribe straight out of Gogol (Igor Ilinsky), an overstuffed American capitalist, and a wayward cinema cameraman (Nikolai Tseretelli). Solntseva’s solemn beauty is the perfect foil for her comic talents, much like Garbo amid the Commissars in Ninotchka. The plot is a spiraling, self-reflexive satire as a film crew experiences the perils and scams involved in shooting in the streets. A documentary on “Everyday Life in the New Moscow,” which our cameraman-hero turns into a Kino Eye exposé, actually provides an extremely valuable look at the old Moscow before it was destroyed during the Stalin period.

—Judy Bloch

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