Joel Adlen on Piano

(Zakrojshchik iz Torzhka). From the director of Aelita, this comedy of everyday life during the New Economic Policy period centers around an elusive winning lottery ticket and the domestic troubles of a village tailor, played by the popular Igor Il'inskii (also featured in Kiss of Mary Pickford). When the film was released, a Pravda critic favorably compared its relatively conventional style to the more politicized agitprop comedies (of which Happiness is a later example): "What can you say about Soviet humor? In the Soviet Union, people laugh for the same reasons as people in other countries....But against this truth, throngs of people, since the Revolution, who are unable to do productive work, have applied themselves to the task of producing Soviet laughter - the famous revolutionary agit-satires....The Tailor from Torzhok is our first successful comic film."

Malevich:

"In The Tailor from Torzhok there are a number of scenes (frames) done entirely in the manner of (nineteenth-century Russian painters) Perov or Polenov. Watching the succession of frames in this picture, you lose a sense of time....One shot of the landscape belongs to the year 1840; another, to the 1880s; a third, to the year 1925. It turns out that the protagonist of Tailor runs through all time periods of an entire century; of course, this is not evident to the masses, or maybe even to the director." (1926)