Thursday Movie Picks, Septebmer 14, 2023: Non-English movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Once again, we get the annual theme of movies not in English. I thought a bit about what movies to use. I've recently watched a couple of movies fitting the theme that I haven't yet blogged about, so I decided to hold off on using them. But then, what foreign movies have I watched that haven't been dubbed into English? I wouldn't have minded using a film like De Lift if I had seen a subtitled version instead of a dubbed version. But in the end I came up with three movies that fit the theme:

Arsenal (1929). OK, this is a silent movie, but it was made in Russian by the Soviet film director of Ukrainian descent Aleksandr Dovzhenko. During the early days of the Civil War that followed the October 1917 revolution, a committed communist stops the anti-communist Whites from taking control of the arsenal in Kiev. Dovzhenko's visuals here are almost as good as in his later Earth, although both are used for propaganda effect.

Walpurgis Night (1935). An early role for Ingrid Bergman in her native Sweden before coming to Hollywood, this movie deals with the falling birth rate in the country at the time. Bergman plays the secretary to a banker trapped in a loveless marriage in which the wife seeks out an illicit abortion. Bergman's character is also the daughter of a newspaper editor (Victor Sjöström) who writes editorials about the need for Sweden to have a higher birth rate. The two stories come together when the clinic where the abortions are performed is raided.

The Shop on Main Street (1965). This movie, filmed in a small village in what is now eastern Slovakia, deals with the World War II years when Slovakia was a nominally independent puppet state aligned with the Nazis, who had of course turned the Czech lands into a protectorate under Reinhard Heydrich. A lowly carpenter whose brother-in-law is trying to get in with the government is given orders to run a dry-goods store which had previously been run by an elderly Jewish woman who is probably going to die soon anyway, and doesn't seem to have any clue of the danger Jews are in.