Live Musical Accompaniment by Yakov Gubanov

“Lady-Killer Killed by a Killer-Lady” might serve as a headline for the plot of Child of the Big City. The he of the story, a rich and idle man named Victor, is satiated with his victories over the “cultured” women of his class. She, named Mania, is a poor orphan, a simple seamstress, fresh and easy prey. Or so he thinks—for it is she, not he, who turns out to be the predator. A wild child of the city (wait for a glimpse of Moscow in the window behind her), Mania is, as one intertitle describes her, an innate femme fatale. What makes this film a good example of Bauer’s staging is his inventive use of the foreground curtain to flank/unflank the space of action in the background, as in the scene in which Victor, a ruined man, arrives at her art nouveau mansion, interrupting the tango party within. Yes, the tango—1914 was the year of the tango craze in Russia. Mania and her lover/servant are played by the then-famous pair of tango dancers, Elena Smirnova and Leonid Iost, whose elaborate dance routine takes on a particular malevolence thanks to Bauer’s dramatic crosscutting.

Daydreams is an uncanny story that is uncannily similar to Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo. Sergei, an inconsolable widower, runs into a young woman named Tina, a spitting image of his late wife—in every sense except for the latter’s purity and kindness. To perfect the likeness, Sergei makes Tina wear his wife’s clothes, none of which are to her liking. In the course of an ugly argument about Tina’s right to her own identity, Sergei strangles her with the most bizarre garrote ever used in the history of crime.