There are many remarkable circumstances in this film. Anton Tchekhov died in 1904. The film starts in 1919 and then goes back to 1912, not any earlier. It's a Tchekhov story all right, all the melancholy and deep knowledge of human nature is there, all characters are in style and very Tchekhovian, in fact, the film couldn't be more Tchekhovian, and yet it goes far beyond what Tchekhov ever could imagine, as if it was written by Tchekhov after the revolution.
It's a very sad story framed by typical hilarious Tchekhovian human comedy. Both Edward Everett's priceless character of an old befuddled aristocrat and Linda Darnell's scandal beauty are thoroughly comedians, like also her hilarious father (Sig Ruman, in one of HIS best performances,) and all the local people around them. The only tragic character is George Sanders as judge Petrov, and, to some degree, his fiancée Anna Lee, who sees the tragedy but can't do anything about it, the only one to get out of it whole.
George Sanders was an exiled Russian aristocrat himself, and this is one of the few films in which he gives his original character away. He later learned such perfect English that no one could suspect he had been anything but an English snob, but to his misfortune he got out of the Russian revolution alive. All his characters were generally bitter frustrated superior losers usually digging their own graves by pride and conceit, with a few exceptions, like in Hitchcock's "The Foreign Correspondent". Here he is the victim of his own uncontrollable destiny, as he finds himself unable to rule his own passion. This film is his tragedy, he actually gives a song in Russian at one point, while the other characters, above all Linda Darnell and Edward Everett Horton, take over the film.
You must accept her irresistible beauty, and you must understand how both Horton and Sanders had to give in to it. She is simply shamelessly, outrageously and overbearingly beautiful, such a career just has to come to a dreadful end, while poor befuddled Horton just can't understand anything of what is happening. In spite of his own tragedy, which doesn't seem to become him much, as he is incorrigible in his own way, he remains the one surviving comedian of this ludicrous but very melancholy tragedy, like in fact a human epitaph on the fallen old Russia.
It's a very sad story framed by typical hilarious Tchekhovian human comedy. Both Edward Everett's priceless character of an old befuddled aristocrat and Linda Darnell's scandal beauty are thoroughly comedians, like also her hilarious father (Sig Ruman, in one of HIS best performances,) and all the local people around them. The only tragic character is George Sanders as judge Petrov, and, to some degree, his fiancée Anna Lee, who sees the tragedy but can't do anything about it, the only one to get out of it whole.
George Sanders was an exiled Russian aristocrat himself, and this is one of the few films in which he gives his original character away. He later learned such perfect English that no one could suspect he had been anything but an English snob, but to his misfortune he got out of the Russian revolution alive. All his characters were generally bitter frustrated superior losers usually digging their own graves by pride and conceit, with a few exceptions, like in Hitchcock's "The Foreign Correspondent". Here he is the victim of his own uncontrollable destiny, as he finds himself unable to rule his own passion. This film is his tragedy, he actually gives a song in Russian at one point, while the other characters, above all Linda Darnell and Edward Everett Horton, take over the film.
You must accept her irresistible beauty, and you must understand how both Horton and Sanders had to give in to it. She is simply shamelessly, outrageously and overbearingly beautiful, such a career just has to come to a dreadful end, while poor befuddled Horton just can't understand anything of what is happening. In spite of his own tragedy, which doesn't seem to become him much, as he is incorrigible in his own way, he remains the one surviving comedian of this ludicrous but very melancholy tragedy, like in fact a human epitaph on the fallen old Russia.