Recent Locarno and Telluride Film Festival tributes to Boris Barnet only underscore the notion that, if Barnet's films are relatively unknown in the United States, it is only due to their lack of availability here. With three social satires, The Girl with the Hatbox (1927), House on Trubnaya Square (1928) and Okraina (1933), Barnet established himself as the leading Soviet director of comedies, although a 40-year career spanned the genres from comedy to thrillers and dramas. He has been called the USSR's Leo McCarey for these perceptive satires, filled with the minutae of everyday life and propelled less by traditional Soviet montage than by Barnet's robust humor and instinctive eye for human behavior. His films are peopled by eccentrics (especially spunky women), vividly captured in location environments, and they are also broadly inventive in style.
