Our print of The General Line is a restoration of the director's cut, with the original title and ending as they were before Stalin called for a re-edit. Eisenstein's first contemporary, rural subject, it tells of a peasant woman's struggle against superstition, hostility, and greed in her attempt to form a collective and bring to it a bull, a cream separator, and a tractor. Here is one of Eisenstein's most beautiful if least known films, in which he developed his editorial concepts of "sensual montage." The delicacy of the artist's labor carries its own irony; this film wasn't cut with a tractor! The General Line is Eisenstein's "Russian Gothic," populated with wonderful types often posed for the camera, and filled with humor and earthy imagery. There is a cream-separator spectacle to rival Busby Berkeley, wheat fields worthy of Tolstoy, marvelous anti-bureaucratic satire on the level of the Russian Eccentrics, and, despite Variety's observation that the film lacks love interest, a very moo-ving wedding.