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This is a Soviet film, called GIBEL SENSATII, which translates as "Loss of Sensation". Steve Joyce, silent and early sound SF film enthusiast and writer did an article for Harry Long's "Van Helsing's Journal", issue 8, a couple-three years back. He'd gotten a DVD of the whole film and sent me a copy for comment, and we had a long talk on the phone one night about it and other films Soviet - and his article was a general article on productions of R.U.R. but included his analysis of this film. We were both hampered to some degree in understanding the film by the fact that neither one of us speaks Russian, and the source print had no English subtitles. It also was never shown in the US and has been evidently seen by no other commentator before Steve got to it, so there was no earlier literature - at any rate, in English and known to us - to refer to except a brief mention in the Hardy Boys' SF Films "Encyclopedia".

On the rare occasions where someone notices the title, the connection to Capek's play is made because the robots have the Roman letters R.U.R. engraved on their enormous chests. However, the main titles do not credit Capek's play, and the menacing nature of the robots throughout the film make it clear to me that the whole idea of the film is to *repudiate* Capek's story of replacing human workers with robots. Steve and I disagreed on this to some degree, but I saw the film as a trashing of the idea, among other un-Soviet things like independent research and an early vision of the military-industrial complex. Of course, just this minute I can't remember the scientist-engineer's name - oh, yeah, it was Rippl. Rippl's Universal Robots. Rossum in Czech means something like "wisdom"; Rippl in Russian means nothing at all, which I found significant. Anyway, this young factory foreman in an unnamed country where a lot of words are written in English and a sign outside a nightclub has the word BAR inside a neon rhombus which, between the shape and positioning of the lettering in "bar" makes it look exactly like the logo of UFA, the big (by then Nazi) German film studio - this guy, Rippl, is concerned by the number of workers who are falling out from exhaustion at the factory he oversees, so he goes back to school and gets what seems to be a mechanical engineering degree, and then begins, on his own and despite the objections of others who learn what he's doing, to build these monstrous robots that will replace the workers and can go 24 hours a day. Well, a coalition of military people and bankers in their top hats and tails, get ahold of Rippl and urge him on. The robots don't quite work right, and the displaced workers are in a froth. The military finally takes charge of them and uses them as weapons to stem a worker's revolt, but, rather inexplicably, one of the workers who is either supposed to be Hispanic or Native American (there are also a few shots of African-wherever members of the work force) has gotten a device which allows him to turn the robots back on their masters. Rippl is killed when one of his robots mercilessly runs over him (the apparently humanitarian feelings which started on this project, like his name, count for nothing in the face of the overall social damage his wild hair idea has caused), chases off the military, and crush the bankers against a brick wall. The film ambiguously ends here. It just reeks of socialist realism but, like KOSMICHETSKII REIS, a more upbeat film (COSMIC JOURNEY), it doesn't seem to have been considered worth mentioning even in pro-Soviet works on Soviet films - there seems to be, or to have been, even into the 60s, a great deal of discomfort in the Soviet mind with science fictional themes, at least in the movies.

Anyway, that's how I viewed and interpreted the film. If Steve's still around, hopefully he'll find this thread and chime in. And CHFB-ers who still have their copies of issue 8 of Van Helsing's Journal can read his thoughts there too.