Motion Picture Director. One of many talented Soviet filmakers whose early promise was stamped out by Communist Party dictates. His first film was his best: "Lieutenant Kije" (1934). Based on a novella by Yuri Tynyanov (who wrote the screenplay) and set during the reign of Czar Paul I, it is a delightful satire of bureaucratic stupidity that transcends time and place. Sergei Prokofiev's score, arranged into a concert suite by the composer, is world famous. Alexander Nikoleyevich Faintsimmer was born in what is now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography in 1927 and worked as an assistant director on several films, notably Pudovkin's "The End of St. Petersburg" (1927). In 1929 he joined the Belgoskino studio in Leningrad. Promoted to director in 1932, he and author Tynyanov immediately began planning an adaptation of "Lieutenant Kije", but red tape, troubles with funding, and censorship issues dragged out the production for nearly two years. Faintsimmer himself invited Prokofiev, who had never worked in films before, to write the music. Not only was he a natural for the medium, the score marked a turning point in his stylistic evolution, a "new simplicity" intended, at least in part, for Soviet audiences. (The composer was then living in Paris exile and this project was a step in his gradual return to the USSR, which became permanent in 1936). "Lieutenant Kije" was a considerable popular success. The film was released internationally as "The Czar Wants to Sleep" and was still being shown in Soviet theatres four years later. But its sardonic tone drew criticism on ideological grounds - it required no great stretch of the imagination to compare the fear-generated bureaucracy of Paul I with that of Stalin. Writer Tynyanov was reprimanded and never worked in cinema again, while Faintsimmer spent the next 40 years turning out mostly propaganda features. He was employed at the Lenfilm studio from 1940 to 1955 and at Mosfilm from 1956 until his retirement in 1979. Of interest among his later films are "The Gadfly" (1955), with a score by Shostakovich, and a series of crime dramas with which he ended his career, including "Fifty-Fifty" (1972), "No Margin for Error" (1972), and "Tavern on Pyatnitskaya" (1978). Long unavailable in the West, "Lieutenant Kije" surfaced on the internet in 2008, giving new audiences a chance to enjoy one of the most entertaining Soviet films of the 1930s.