Coming as it does from the depths of the Stalinist regime, the Russian Road to Life is a remarkably optimistic film. A host of nonprofessional children are cast as Moscow street kids, left homeless by the Bolshevik revolution. They get into all sorts of melodramatic scrapes until they're rounded up by kindly, altruistic Soviet functionaries. The children are reformed (in the nicest possible way) and made useful members of society. Road to Life is simplistic in its solutions to society's problems, albeit no more so than the usual Hollywood product from the same period.…
