"Shorin is a sailor from the Aurora who jumps ship to spend the night with Valya, a girl he has met in the Leningrad amusement park, and their clandestine affair is abetted by a sinister petty criminal who also performs at the park as a magician. If the storyline of Kozintzev and Trauberg's first full feature sounds more like a French New Wave film of forty years later than a venerable Soviet classic, this shouldn't surprise us. That it does--and that the work of the FEKS group and Leningrad filmmakers in general has been consistently undervalued alongside the Muskovites Eisenstein and Pudovkin--is a measure of how little early Soviet filmmaking has been viewed as cinema, rather than as propaganda or theory. 'Better to be a young pup than an old bird of paradise' was the original FEKS slogan in 1922 (borrowed from Mark Twain), and they stood above all for a cinema attuned to the interests of young audiences rather than the straight-laced prescriptions of Moscow administrators. Their witty irreverence attracted a strong following, which soon included the leading critics Shklovsky and Tynianov, and provided a dynamic working model for a cinema that would be both contemporary and revolutionary. Shorin and Valya's adventures in the Leningrad underworld lead them to a new sense of responsibility, but the moral never swamps the message of cinematic discovery." Ian Christie