Peter the First, Part I

The film is about the Russian tsar Peter the Great. The account begins in 1700. That year the Russians took a heavy defeat at Narva. Peter arrives at Veliky Novgorod with his close ally Alexander Menshikov. He reprimands his son Alexei because the city has not been fortified. He then leads the siege of Marienburg and takes the town. The war being waged against Sweden is the ground of the account. Peter’s reforms begin in the same period. The work was adapted from a play by Aleksey Tolstoy. This is the first Soviet film about Peter. Nikolai Simonov and Mikhail Zharov take the leads in Vladimir Petrov’s Soviet film of 1937.