Vera Yureneva is a celebrated doctor who performs cures impossible to her male colleagues, tends to the famous and powerful, and is engaged to Ivan Mozzhukhin. At least, that's how the titles read on the copy that the Dutch Eye Institute has posted to YouTube. The credits indicate that in the original Russian version, as directed by Pyotr Chardynin, they are married. This makes a difference, because her busy schedule causes her to be away from her fiance, or perhaps husband, so he goes out in a huff and marries (or makes a mistress of) cafe waitress M. Morskaya.
Is the distinction one of degree, or does it cross the line into a real difference? Both sets of triangles are common enough, in reality and fiction, and depending on your beliefs, may or may not make a difference to you. However, it does in the movie, especially Miss Morskaya falls ill with something that only Miss Yureneva can deal with.
Pre-Communist Russian films have largely fallen into desuetude, but this is a fine and advanced film for 1914, with a tryptich shot the year after Lois Weber used one in SUSPENSE. Had Chardynin seen Weber's film? Hard to say. The thrust of this film is essentially normative, a well-produced bit of tear-jerking.
Chardynin would continue to work after the Revolution -- often abroad; eventually he would return to the now Soviet Union, where his career would end in 1928 with official disapproval, after directing more than 100 films. He died in 1934, age 61.
