The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks

This satiric comedy, which ridicules the absurd preconceptions of Soviet Russia held by certain Americans, involves the visit of a certain Mr. West, president of the YMCA, to the USSR. To protect himself against the “horrors” of life in the USSR as depicted in the American press, Mr. West takes with him a bodyguard, the cowboy Jeddy. The two fall into the clutches of a gang of swindlers. When the con-men are arrested, Mr. West, accompanied by a representative of the Soviet government, is given a tour of the genuine Soviet Russia. Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) was the first aesthetic theorist of the cinema, and organizer of the now-famous Workshop where in 1923 the young Sergei Eisenstein studied film direction for the first time. Mr. West was intended as a “showcase of effects” for the newly formed stock company (the Kuleshov Collective, Boris Barnet and Vsevolod Pudovkin among them), who had formulated an external, circus-like, physical style of acting.