Dvds - All-American Soviet Heroine - Miss Mend on DVD - NYTimes.com AMONG the choices facing a filmgoer in the Soviet Union of 1926 were three films that have since become textbook classics: Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," V. I. Pudovkin's "Mother" and Dziga Vertov's "One Sixth of the World." But much of the citizenry preferred "Miss Mend," a wild pastiche of American adventure serials directed by Fedor Ozep and Boris Barnet. Filled with car chases and kidnappings, fist fights and physical comedy, "Miss Mend" was released in three feature-length episodes and set a box office record (1.7 million spectators) for its time. The party-line critics, of course, despised it, decrying its ideological impurity and lowbrow appeal. "One can only hope that "Miss Mend" will never be exported abroad," sniffed a writer for Kino-Front, and for a long time that hope was fulfilled. This was not the kind of Soviet film the left-leaning intelligentsia of New York and London wanted to see. Where were the noble peasants, the thrumming farm machinery, the virtuoso passages of dialectical montage? Instead, here was a story, its first half set in an imagined United States, about a plucky working girl, Miss Vivian Mend (Natalia Glan), who joins with a reporter (played by Barnet, who gave the character his own name), a photographer, Vogel (Vladimir Fogel) and a tubby office clerk, Tom Hopkins (Igor Ilyinsky, a popular comedian), to combat a secret organization of international capitalists. The principal villain, Chiche (Sergei Komarov), is a coldhearted mastermind who plans to destroy the new society of the Bolsheviks by means of electrical insulators filled with plague germs. Entertaining, sure, but for the ideologues, just more opium for the masses. Not until the 1980s did "Miss Mend" begin turning up regularly at cinémathèques and festivals; not until now has it been released on home video. Largely derived from the original camera negative, it looks amazingly good in this edition from Flicker Alley; it is accompanied by a stirring orchestral score by Robert Israel. On one level "Miss Mend" is an early example of a movie about movies. Based on a novel called "Mess-Mend, or Yankees in Petrograd" published by the Soviet author Marietta Shaginian under the consummately American pseudonym Jim Dollar, the film draws on Hollywood archetypes for many of its characters. Miss Mend, a typist for a cork factory (Rocfeller & Company), is a Slavic Pearl White in pencil skirt and black stockings, radicalized when she witnesses a strike brutally repressed by her employers. Barnet (far too good looking to be either a journalist or a director) has the athletic grace and easy charm of a Douglas Fairbanks; and Tom, the comic relief, has Fatty Arbuckle's appetites and infantile gestures (if not his aggressiveness). But where the good guys are all American, the heavy seems to have stepped out of the other national cinema much admired in Russia at the time, that of Weimar Germany. Komarov's Chiche, with his domed forehead and horn-rimmed glasses, seems at once to derive from Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse and Robert Weine's Dr. Caligari, as do many of his actions. At one point he even rises from a coffin, like F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu." The Weimar filmmakers seemed to enjoy swooning in voluptuous surrender before these supernaturally powerful figures, but the Soviets are unwilling to indulge such decadent pessimism: Chiche and his capitalist scheming can and must be defeated by representatives of the masses. Much as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would do in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Ozep and Barnet signal their attitude toward the material by overplaying it, adding layers of complications that strain credulity. A fine example is the chase for a purloined will that comes near the end of Part 1, which involves horses, cars, a motorcycle and a steam locomotive, all charging along in a swirl of expertly intercut strands of action. But where Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg drift into cartoonishness, Ozep and Barnet preserve a core of human reality. For all of the exaggeration of the action, the emotions seem real, and death still has its sting, striking at least one major character with a force and suddenness that abruptly brings the film back to earth. When the action shifts to Leningrad in the film's second half, the directors confront a fresh ideological problem: there's no way these American heroes can be shown single-handedly rescuing the young Soviet state. Their solution is ingenious: They bring in the film's only fully developed Russian character, a street urchin who introduces Vogel the photographer to the joys of vodka and shows him how to survive on leftover sausage ends. And when the time comes to close in on Chiche, the Americans discover what they should have known all along, that the Soviet police have matters well in hand already. After "Miss Mend," Ozep and Barnet went their separate ways as filmmakers. Ozep made two fine expressionist dramas, "The Yellow Ticket" (1928) and "The Living Corpse" (1929), and then, as working conditions became more difficult in Stalin's Soviet Union, he emigrated to the West, making films in Germany (including a brilliant adaptation of "The Brothers Karamazov"), France and eventually Canada, where he made his two final films ("The Fortress" and "Whispering City") in 1947. Drawn more to lighter subjects, Barnet survived Stalin's crackdowns by flying under the radar, and was able to create two genuine masterpieces in the "30s, "Outskirts" (1933, available on an Image DVD with his silent comedy "The Girl With the Hatbox") and the transcendently beautiful "By the Bluest of Seas" (1936, unavailable in the United States although a budget disc is out in France). He continued to work regularly (though seldom at the height of his talent) through the early "60s, when he put an end to decades of disappointment by hanging himself in a hotel room. For both men "Miss Mend" represented a moment of youthful exuberance and creative freedom that they would never experience again. Its characters may be American, but the joy that shines through it is that of the infant Soviet state, still toddling through its Utopian period when everything was new, and a world was waiting to be made. It was a moment that couldn't and didn't last long; thanks to "Miss Mend" we can still share it. Flicker Alley, $39.95, not rated INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Brad Pitt leads a special Army unit of angry Jewish young men on a rampage through Nazi-occupied France in Quentin Tarantino's World War II fantasia. Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, two-disc standard definition $34.98, single-disc standard definition $29.98, R TAKING WOODSTOCK An aspiring Manhattan interior decorator (Demetri Martin) learns about life when he moves upstate to help his parents run their Catskills motel, located just down the road from a certain music festival. Ang Lee directed; with Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy and Imelda Staunton. Universal, Blu-ray $39.98, standard definition $29.98, R THE HEADLESS WOMAN An Argentine woman (Maria Onetto) is shaken from her world of bourgeois privilege when she runs over a mysterious something on an isolated dirt road. Lucrecia Martel ("La Ciénaga") directed. Strand, $27.99, not rated THE HANGOVER Three groomsmen misplace their groom-to-be during a wild night in Las Vegas, as directed by Todd Phillips ("Old School"). With Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Justin Bartha. Warner Home Video, Blu-ray $35.99, two-disc standard definition $34.99, single-disc $28.98, available in R and unrated editions 2009 NEW YORK YANKEES: THE OFFICIAL WORLD SERIES FILM The Yankees against the Phillies - don't give away the ending! (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray $29.99, standard definition $19.99, not rated)