The Ghost That Never Returns

José Real, a strike leader ten years in prison, is given a day's leave to see his family, and the guards know, as he does, that men on leave are shot on the road and never return. A police agent walks behind him, and the film follows the two of them across a desert to an oilfield where the workers are waiting. Abram Room, after Bed and Sofa, shoots the prison as geometry and the road as endurance, from a Henri Barbusse story set in an unnamed South American republic. Less a revolutionary saga than a study of a man deciding whether to be the hero required of him. Sovkino, 1930.