The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna

Nina Petrovna is kept by a colonel in St Petersburg and leaves him for a lieutenant who has nothing; the lieutenant loses at cards to the colonel and is ruined; and Nina goes back to the colonel to buy him out of disgrace and tells the boy the lie of the title, that she never loved him. Then she takes poison. Brigitte Helm, for once not a machine or a monster, plays a woman making a decision, and Hanns Schwarz directs with the long takes and moving camera of Ufa at its most expensive. Francis Lederer is the lieutenant. An Erich Pommer production, 1929, restored in 1988.