“Away with improvisation-THIS is creation,” raved none other than Ingmar Bergman after seeing Josef Heifitz's riveting version of Chekhov's most romantic tale. The married bank clerk Dmitri (Alexei Batalov, The Cranes Are Flying) is vacationing alone in Yalta when he spots the titular lady with the dog (Iya Savvina), who's also conveniently left the spouse at home; their brief affair soon blossoms into furtive trips to their home towns (Moscow and Leningrad, respectively), and a doomed realization that their lives, unfortunately, may never come together. Bergman screened the film for the cast of his stage adaptation of another Chekhov play, so impressed was he with the film's impeccable bridge between faithful adaptation and cinematic beauty. “You have really everything in this film. You experience it with every sense,” he commented in a 1961 article in Films and Filming. “Knowing The Lady with the Dog is a blessing. . . . I consider it supreme in filmmaking.”