Bruce Loeb on Piano This satiric comedy, which ridicules the absurd conceptions of Soviet Russia held by Americans, involves a visit to the USSR of a certain Mr. West, president of the YMCA. To protect himself against the savages and Red bandits depicted in the U.S. press, he takes with him a bodyguard, the cowboy Jeddy (portrayed by filmmaker Boris Barnet). The two fall into the clutches of a gang of hooligans who show them exactly what they expect to see. Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) was the first aesthetic theorist of the cinema and organizer of the now-famous Workshop where in 1923 the young Sergei Eisenstein studied film direction for the first time. Mr. West is a wonderful example of the circus-like, entirely physical style of acting that the Workshop (whose members included Barnet and V. I. Pudovkin) developed. Ian Christie writes, "This gleeful satire on the excesses of American anti-Bolshevik propaganda is also an affectionate parody/analysis of American popular cinema with fights, chases and rescues, brilliantly choreographed according to Kuleshov's `rehearsal method.'"