Script by Chekhov

The Lady with the Dog is a Russian movie that tells a story by Anton Chekhov and tells it simply and clearly from start to finish.

Dimitri, summering at Yalta, meets Anna, a sad-faced beauty who promenades every day along the quay with her little white spitz, Ralph. Dimitri has a wife, a pince-nezed intellectual, back in Moscow; Anna's husband is a foppish flunky in Saratov. As they become friends and lovers, Anna's unhappiness and self-recrimination grow stronger: Dimitri at length returns to Moscow to face the winter and his wife's domineering. Then, aboard a tram one day, he sees a little white dog go scampering through the snowy streets . . .

Realizing that he must see Anna, Dimitri travels to Saratov and meets her at the opera furtively between the acts. She promises to come to Moscow to see him. Their encounters thereafter, in her drab hotel room, are filled with the sadness of the fate that brought them together too late. "We are like two migrating birds," says Anna, "caught and put into separate cages."

The bittersweet mood of boredom (in every scene a clock seems to be ticking) is classically Chekhovian. The actors--Alexei Batalov and lya Savvina--are at once wholly natural and wholly professional, and Director Josef Heifitz' black-and-white camera work, while academic, manages magically to evoke the torpid heat of Yalta, the snowy chill of Moscow. And nowhere in the film is there a foot of propaganda--either for home consumption or for foreign eyes.

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