The Great Consoler

O. Henry, jailed in Ohio, turns the prison around him into consoling stories, so a safecracker destroyed by the warders becomes Jimmy Valentine, redeemed and married; and a shop clerk outside reads the stories, takes them for truth, and picks up a gun. Three styles for the three worlds, with the stories played as silent-film pastiche. Lev Kuleshov, whose workshop had trained half the Soviet directors of the twenties, made it as a defence of himself, and the question it asks, what an artist owes the people he consoles, was not a welcome one in 1933. Aleksandra Khokhlova is the clerk. Mezhrabpomfilm.