One Cossack or another

John Gilbert was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and once again that gave me the opportunity to record a couple of silent movies that I hadn't seen before, or hadn't blogged about before. One of those was The Cossacks, and recently I finally got around to watching it.

The Cossacks as a people were a semi-nomad group of Slavs who were allowed in Tsarist Russia to live in semi-autonomous regions, in exchange for providing military service to the Tsars so that the Tsars wouldn't have to draft so many more settled Russians into the military. One result of this is that they become renowned for their military prowess, while at the same time not having that great a respect for outside authority. This movie version has the Cossacks living in a time when Russia was busy fighting the Turks, which would place it in the 18th or 19th centuries; the movie is based on a book by Leo Tolstoy.

John Gilbert stars as Lukashka, a Cossack who, unlike the others in his village, isn't all that interested in fighting. This ticks off his fater Ivan (Ernest Torrence), but also his girlfriend Maryana (Renée Adorée). She wouldn't want to marry Lukashka if he's going to be the laughing stock of the community. Not only that, but she's more than willing to take part in the ridicule that everybody else is heaping toward him.

Lukashka is determined to prove that he can be just as brave as his fellow villagers, and gets the chance to prove it when some of the Turkish POWs stage a prison break. Lukashka could have Maryana now, but there's one problem: the Tsar needs them to go off to war again, and Lukahska goes with his fellow villagers. While he's away, the Tsar sends Prince Olenin (Nils Asther) to the Cossack village. In the name of ethnic harmony, the Tsar wans some of his princes to marry Cossack women, and Olenin has been given that task. Olenin falls for Maryana, and even proposes marriage to her, but she doesn't want it. Of course, there's the question of how much choice she has.

Things go from bad to worse when Lukashka comes home from the latest military campaign to find a prince putting the moves on what should be his girlfriend. Now, since John Gilbert is the star here, we can expect that he's going to wind up with the girl in the final reel, but how? That's going to involve some more battles with the Turks.

There were, to me, multiple problems with The Cossacks. One is that the story didn't seem to know where it wanted to go. Apparently, the screenplay was altered several times during shooting, which would explain why it's such a mess. Also, the movie starts off slowly, really boring me for the first half hour. This is a fairly obvious problem as well, although things pick up in the second half of the movie. And then it also doesn't help that both of the leads are miscast here. John Gilbert seems to be playing John Gilbert, Hollywood Star, while Renée Adorée doesn't come across as Cossack peasant at all.

So I have to say that there are better John Gilbert movies out there to watch than The Cossacks.