The Love of Jeanne Ney

Pabst's adaptation of a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg is in many ways a trial run for his masterpiece Pandora's Box, made the following year. Its German heroine flees from the Crimea after her Bolshevik lover has assassinated her diplomat father; the main part of the film finds her in Paris, struggling to maintain her integrity amid sundry corruptions and betrayals. The characters are not drawn with the depth of the later film, and the sheer density of plot tends to dominate everything else. The extraordinary richness of Pabst's visual articulation, however, turns this into an advantage: the narrative courses along vigorously, taking both Pabst's social insights and his aesthetic effects in its stride without wavering.