Boule de Suif

A coach leaves occupied Rouen in 1870 with merchants, nuns, a count and a prostitute, a Prussian officer holds it at an inn until the prostitute sleeps with him, and the passengers coax her into it and then will not share their food with her. Mikhail Romm shoots the coach interior as a jury room, and Maupassant's story survives the move to Moscow intact. His first film, made silent for lack of money in a studio that had already gone to sound. Galina Sergeyeva is Boule de Suif, and Faina Ranevskaya, in her first film, is the merchant's wife. Mosfilm, 1934, sixty-four minutes.