Red heroine, Sonia.

This film was part of the ‘Rediscoveries and Restorations’ programme at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. In the Brochure it was one of two films titled ‘The Red Peril’, an apparent witticism that seem inappropriate just before the Centenary of The Great October Revolution. This film at least had the merit of being less virulent than the second title, The World and its Woman (also 1919).

Kevin Brownlow, in the Festival Catalogue, recorded that

“1919 was the year of the Red Scare, when Holubar [the director and co-writer] exchanged the Hun as villain with the Bolshevik, in one of the many political films that appeared just before the movies rejected “message pictures” and embraced the Jazz Age. …. the film was not an anti-Bolshevik hate picture. It was unique in presenting not only good and bad Capitalists but good and bad Communists.”

Whilst Kevin Brownlow…