The Death Ray (1925)
March 16, 1925Release Date
The Death Ray (1925)
March 16, 1925Release Date
Plot.
Where to Watch.
Cast & Crew.
Porfiri Podobed
Vsevolod Pudovkin
Writer / Assistant Director / Production Design
Sergei Komarov
Tomas Lann
Vladimir Fogel
Sergey Komarov
Tomas Lann
Alexandra Khokhlova
Assistant Director
Sergey Khokhlov
Andrei Gorchilin
Details.
Release DateMarch 16, 1925
Original NameЛуч смерти
StatusReleased
Running Time2h 5m
Genres
Last updated:
Wiki.
The Death Ray (Russian: Луч смерти, romanized: Luch smerti) is a 1925 Soviet science fiction film directed by Lev Kuleshov. The first and last reels of the film have been lost. This film ran at 2 hours, 5 minutes, making this one of the earliest full length science fiction films.
Despite the fact that many sources claim the inspiration for the film to be the novel The Garin Death Ray by Aleksei Tolstoy, this is not the case. It is impossible, since the book was published two years after the film, in 1927. Furthermore, the film has many similarities with a book by Valentin Kataev, called Lord of Iron, published in 1924. Moreover, the theme of death rays was very popular at the time because of the 1923 claim of British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews to have created a "death ray".