Roman s kontrabasom (1911) User Reviews

The Chekhov Title Involves Contrabassoons -- a Low Blow

[boblipton · 4/10 · 7 February 2019]

Princess Vera Gorskaya goes fishing and eventually decides to go for a dip in the water. Little does she know that musician Nikolai Vasiliyev is swimming in the water... and thieves have stolen his clothes, just as they steal the Princess'.

It's the earliest known movie based on a Chekhov piece and you'd expect it to be some dour satire, rather than a short that looks like something out of a burlesque show. However, that was typical of Chekhov, whose comic works mocked the powerful as often as not.

The story is that at the premiere of THE INSPECTOR GENERAL, the audience was laughing at the idiocies of the government officials. The Tsar said "Don't they know they're being mocked?"

Romance With a Double Bass review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 18 May 2020]

Cinema's first adaptation of a work by noted Russian playwright Anton Chekhov is a light comedy which was probably considered quite saucy for its day. Vera Gorskaya plays a princess who faces acute embarrassment when her clothes are stolen while she's skinny-dipping in a river. It's the sort of titillating morsel that would have been stamped out come the revolution.

Good Early Attempt at Filming Chekhov

[Snow Leopard · 28 April 2004]

For such an early attempt at filming one of Chekhov's stories, this is quite good. It is amusing, and brings out the main features of the story and its settings. It does simplify the story somewhat, and leaves out or omits some of the humorous details of the original - but to some degree that's to be expected from any movie that is adapted from a literary source, and all the more so with such an early attempt.

The short story on which this is based is probably one of Chekhov's less widely-known works. Many of his lighter short stories are near-masterpieces of economy, getting quite a bit out of a simple humorous situation. "Romance With Double Bass" takes a princess and a musician who find themselves in the same silly predicament along a riverbank, and then builds up the situation from there. There's more to the original story than there is in this filming of it, but the film does a good job of creating the atmosphere and telling the story. The settings are nicely done, and they work well. Overall, it's a good job of literary adaptation for such an early movie.