Oleg Frelikh's "Slain by Life" (1927) Russian: Проститутка
It's the heyday of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in mid-1920s Moscow. Some live the high life while others barely survive. A young girl, Lyuba (Elisaveta Yarosh) lives with her elderly Aunt Varvara (Olga Bonus).
The aunt abuses the girl, and later, "sells" her to a neighbor, Vasiliy Dmitrich (Ivan Lagutin). After Luba is obliged to lose her honor, her aunt kicks her out of the house. But Lyuba does not stay out on the street for long. Hoping for better days and a new opportunity, she is sheltered by a woman (Vera Orlova) she meets, who turns out to be a brothel madam. The madam also imposes a contract of adhesion upon the girl in order to survive.
The Tyrkin family lives next to Aunt Barbara. Pyotr Tyrkin works for the businessman-butcher Kondratiev (Pavel Tamm). Tyrkin's everyday life is well-adjusted. His wife Vera keeps house and raises their two young children. Working for Kondratiev brings a regular income. Tyrkin is killed when drunk. Left without a livelihood, Vera is forced by the situation to give herself to the butcher (the boss of her deceased husband), and then to sell her body.
On the street she meets with the veteran mistress Manka. Manka tells Vera that when she worked as a maid, she was seduced by the son of the mistress. After getting kicked out of the house by the mistress for having relations with her son, she became homeless. On the street she came to work at a brothel and contracted a disease from which she is still recovering.
Unable to earn money because of her disease, both of Vera's children fall seriously ill. In desperation she tries to commit suicide by throwing herself into an ice-hole. But she does not succeed and is rescued. Among the saviors is Lyuba who managed to escape from her tragic life and now works in a sewing workshop. She has a new boyfriend, Shura, a member of the Komsomol.
The madame of the house does not want to just let Lyuba go. She threatens to tell Shura all about her past. So, the teary-eyed girl tells Shura everything herself. Shura sympathizes with her and helps to write a letter to the prosecutor. The police break up the den.
After irremediable events, life is getting better. Lyuba and Shura are happy. Manka is provided medical care. Shura helps Vera, who also need hope, get a job as a railway points operator, and her children begin kindergarten.
A 1927 black & white Soviet Bolshevist drama silent film (a/k/a "Prostitutka") directed by Oleg Frelikh, starring Olga Bonu, Ivan Lagutin, Mark Donskoy, L. Krasina, Aleksandr Ledashchev, Vera Orlova, E. Sheremetyeva, Pavel Tamm, E. Toeplitz, Elisaveta Yarosh, Vasili Yaroslavtsev. The first Belarusian feature film. Intertitles are in Russian, English and Chinese. The film was the first production of the national studio "Byelgoskino" one of the newest studios of that time in the U.S.S.R.
This little known dramatic fiction was Frelikh's only film as a director. Prior to this, he had been an actor. Brave for it's day, Frelikh's flawed but interesting effort is a silent rarity because of its subject matter. The world's oldest profession requires a treatment both delicate and balanced, not an easy topic for a first time director like Herr Frelikh. A significant episode of this fragmented open treatment, sometimes chaotic, brave bold film study, which lacks narrative cohesion, is dedicated to the long-winded lecture "about the dangers of the world's oldest profession and social ways of getting rid of it." This politically pious sermonette uses the techniques that the old U.S.S.R. silent films liked so much: statistics (complete with graphs, numbers and percentages), harangues (about the social conditions, causes, and remedies), and simple animation. A kind of indoctrination bulletin from the U.S.S.R.'s Ministry of Health And Family Welfare, interesting in terms of historical and social content, and, like all other religions, the only message the so-called communism of the USSR had to offer was "don't do it".
The first part of the film depicts the social conditions and the causes that lead our heroine to sell her body. The social conditions she endures and the characters she encounters are credible. There is poverty and misery but also redemption. It seems that the consequences and causes of prostitution in the U.S.R.R. are very similar in their origins to the rest of the world, although there is additional suffering for the desperate Russian women because of the cold and snowy streets, a hard place to offer oneself in the open air.
Despite the film's success with the audience, the critics of that time did not receive the film too positively and some saw in it the influence of the "bourgeois pseudo-scientific German films".
A circulaire dated 1937 from "Belgoskino" reported to Boris Shumyatsky in Moscow, the head of the main department of the film industry of the U.S.S.R. about neutralizing "enemy" films. The ban for the film was motivated by the fact that the film was seen as being "politically incorrect".