MovieTime

Review

by Jason Di Rosso, Rod Webb

Today's guest is Eastern European Cinema expert Rod Webb, a former Sydney Film Festival director and SBS programmer who now works at Network Australia. He's chosen the 1966 Mikhail Shapiro film of the 1932 Dimitri Shostakovich opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was banned by Stalin in 1936. It tells of the affair between a merchant's wife and her husband's labourer, and how the couple commit murder to stay together, though ultimately they're doomed.

Director: Mikhail Shapiro
Cast: Galina Vishnevskaya, Artyom Inozemtsev, Nikolai Boyarsky, Aleksandr Sokolov, Roman Tkachuk, Tatyana Gavrilova
Producer: Anna Tubenshlyak
Script: Nikolai Leskov (author), Aleksandr Preis, Dmitri Shostakovich (libretto)
Cinematographer: G. Khokhlov
Editor: I. Glikman
Music: Dmitri Shostakovich
Running time: 112
Australian distributor: Decca
Language: Russian

Further Information

From Kerr to Eternity - Deborah Kerr retrospective at the Sydney Film Festival