Alexander Pushkin is one of the most famous classics, whose contribution to Russian literature is very great. In 1937, in the USSR, marking the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death, the most complete academic collection of works in 16 volumes was published. Not without the production of a film based on the work of Pushkin. They became "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1938), shot on the poem of the same name, glorified once a young graduate of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum Pushkin.
Today, the adaptation of 1938 is not as well known to the modern audience as the film of the same name in 1972. Although I like the film Ptushko closer than the production of Nikitchenko and Nevezhin, but for its time, their adaptation was considered good.
The main feature of “Ruslan and Lyudmila” in 1938, I believe not that the film was black and white (at that time almost all the pictures were like this), but that it was shot in the style of “silent cinema” (at a time when almost all the pictures were shot with sound). This approach was justified. In fact, transferring a literary work to the screen in rhyme is a difficult task. And here the characters on the screen only depict what the voiceover says.
In principle, the creators managed to convey the main storyline of Pushkin’s poem, within 50 minutes. Although for this it was necessary to reduce the number of rivals Ruslan from three to two (Ratmir was absent) and old Finn.
“Ruslan and Lyudmila” turned out to be a very difficult film, because without combined filming, he simply could not do. Even today they look childish, but then they produced the desired effect. Therefore, along with the Golden Key, The New Gulliver and other fairy tale films of the 1930s. "Ruslan and Lyudmila" looks good. Especially remarkable is the fact that the actor Sergey Stolyarov it was in "Ruslan and Lyudmila" that he first tried on the image of a fairy-tale character (successfully embodied later in "Vasilis the Beautiful", "Katching the Immortal", "Sadko", Ilya Muromets).
7 out of 10