Based on Chekhov’s novella The Shooting Party, Summer Storm is the first major Hollywood production Sirk directed after his flight from Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. Set in a flashback to prerevolutionary Russia, the film recounts the downfall of three male characters—a judge, a nobleman, and a farmer—all of whom are corrupted by their affairs with the town femme fatale, a ravishingly beautiful peasant woman with a talent for seducing weak-willed men. Though this film was made a decade before the director’s signature melodramas, it explores many of the same Sirkian themes: guilt, weakness of the will, and the impotence of human action.