I saw the 37-minute version of this one-hour movie directed by Yevgeni Bauer and I found it bizarre and terrifying: not because it was a poor story but because it seemed a commentary of Mack Sennet.
Vera Kholodnaya lives a comfortable, middle-class life. She spends her day shopping and goes home to her comfortable apartment, to her husband, whom she loves, and her baby, whom she adores,and whom the maid has been taking care of. That evening, she and her husband go to a party, and a rich man suggests an affair She rebuffs him. Later, a friend takes her to a park and again, in what seems like a solemn version of a Sennett flirting-in-the-park comedy, she is accosted. When she runs to her friend, she is met with incomprehension, as if to ask why is she upset. This is what happens to beautiful women.
Her husband loses her job. Miss Kholodnaya is trapped in this nightmare world, where rich men who look like Mack Swain and Chester Conklin in well-fitting evening clothes make the rules, without even ineffectual Keystone Kops to to try to stop them, because these are the men who command them. I think that Bauer's audience knew this nightmare world, because they lived in it, just as Sennett's audience did, even as they laughed at their oppressors; sometimes jokes are the only weapons the weak have against the powerful.
Did Bauer know when he made this how little time this particular age had left to run? World War One was raging, and it would bring down the Russia he knew.... and replace it with another, where the aristocracy masqueraded as members of the oppressed classes.
