Word: gogol
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...OVERCOAT. In this virtually flawless Russian film based on Gogol's classic story, Roland Bykov is superb as the nondescript clerk for whom a new overcoat becomes a matter of life and death...
...OVERCOAT. In this virtually flawless Russian film based on Gogol's classic story, Roland Bykov is superb as the nondescript clerk for whom a new overcoat becomes a matter of life and death...
...Overcoat. In Nikolai Gogol's short story, as in this brief and virtually flawless film from Russia, Akaky Akakievich is a hunched, squinty-eyed penpusher, ridiculed at his office, who all winter long must suffer the cold winds of St. Petersburg whipping through his gauze thin overcoat. Compelled to buy a new one at painful cost, he talks to it, sleeps with it, defends it against a threatening moth. Next day, miraculously, Akaky Akakievich and his overcoat create a sen sation at work. His former tormentors are now backslapping friends; he is even invited to a champagne party...
...cautiously dodging snowflakes, and ineffably tragic later as he stumbles through the white night mourning his loss at every window. Everything is right with The Overcoat, except that its literal old-fashioned excellence may seem so familiar that moviegoers will mistake it for a revival. Earlier film versions of Gogol's story include The Last Laugh, a German silent classic starring Emil Jannings, and The Bespoke Overcoat, British Director Jack Clayton's Oscar-winning short of 1956. It is rewarding, apparently, to remake a durable Overcoat...
...Gogol was one of those writers who take up their country's venality as their cross. The closest U.S. equivalent of Dead Souls is Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Gogol's confidence man is Chichikov (Vladimir Belokurov), an on-the-make bureaucrat who haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing...