Customer Reviews

The Girl from Petrovka [VHS]

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This is a romantic comedy drama (directed by Robert Ellis Miller in 1974) about the relationship between a free-spirited Russian girl (beautiful Goldie Hawn) who is trying to get to the west and a world-weary American foreign correspondent. Hopkins is playing Kostya, a cheery local black marketeer. He's wonderful with that russian accent he took. Despite the quality of the film, Hopkins says in his biography that it was the worst film he ever played and he argues that he didn't even see it! It's up to you now... Make your opinion!

When a great actor performs, his performance may be so convincing that the audience may not recognize him. So it is with Anthony Hopkins and his character Kostya. His face is in front of you, but it's a few minutes before you realize it is Anthony Hopkins. For this performance alone you should watch the film. But, there's more...
Goldie Hawn plays a serious character. Her eastern European accent is done well and her acting is impressive.
The story begins with Joe (Hal Holbrook),a middle-aged journalist, who has won some literary awards and is currently working in Moscow for an American newspaper. His much missed ex-wife has recently died and there are a few things of hers in his apartment so he decides to sell them. He asks Kostya, a local friend and informal broker, to help sell her possessions. At this rummage sale is where our story gets moving.
Oktyabrina (Goldie) is a young Russian woman who is in Moscow without papers. She is mysterious. She holds her friends at a distance while she flits around with her own mostly unknown agenda. Joe is immediately entranced. He finds out that a kindly Russian official (Gregoire Aslan) is seeing her. Though Kostya is "spoken for", he helps Oktyabrina from time to time. It ends sadly in a somewhat abrupt way but, it is well worth watching.
note: There is a Swedish dvd in widescreen. You must have a player capable of playing Region 2, PAL, discs of course. When you insert the disc into the player, pick a Scandinavian language to get to the main menu and then you can remove the subtitles.

[[ASIN:6303686826 Dollars [VHS]

Coming as the ditzy blonde from LAUGH-IN, Goldie Hawn is taken to be a comic, but her dramatic range spans the gamut from boffo in FOUL PLAY to dark drama in DECEIVED. As THE GIRL FROM PETROVKA, Goldie plays a tragic Russian girl who seeks some of the American things of life in postwar Moscow. Lacking the papers needed for a job and lodgings, she is supported by friends and a kindly apparachnik, through whom she meets Joe, an American news correspondent who falls in love with pretty young dreamer.

Shot in Vienna, the film portrays a sympathetic group of young Russians struggling to find the necessities, a few little luxuries, and some meaning in the austere life of the Worker's Paradise --- especially some heat and hot water in winter. The story climaxes with Goldie's aiding a young man to escape to the West. Her misadventure takes her away from Moscow and the American who never forgets the free-spirit from Petrovka.

The young Goldie is hardly recognizable in overworn dress and Petrouchka make-up. Her performance is adequate but she is not the Slav that Meryl Streep became in SOPHIE's CHOICE. The balletic beauty of her brief shot walking over rooftops is memorable.
The movie is not a plotted story so much as vignettes of Moscow's working class after that terrible war --- as Americans thought it was.
TP

It is a simply and tragic love story between girl from communist Russia (Goldie Hawn) and American Journalist (Anthony Hopkins). It does not mater where we are living we have this same needs and dreams. Sometimes the only way to fulfill the dreams is to have big imagination and enjoy every spark of color in the gray reality. Great movie for everyone who feels tired of watching latest shallow Hollywood productions.