Through Fire, Water and... Brass Pipes

Vasya is a young charcoal burner in the forest and falls in love with Alyonushka. She loves him too. But Alyonushka is carried off by Koschei the Deathless and shut up in his palace. Vasya sets out to save her. Along the way he goes through fire, through water, and finally through brass pipes. In Russian the phrase means having been through everything; fire and water are danger, while the brass pipes are fame, and that is the hardest of the three. Aleksandr Rou was the master of the fairy-tale film in Soviet cinema and made a run of them from the thirties onward. This is one of those. Georgi Millyar plays Koschei and other parts too; he was the villain in almost all of Rou's films and a generation knew him by that face. Natalya Sedykh is Alyonushka. Eighty-six minutes. The story speaks to children, but the warning about fame is for grown-ups.