Trivia

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 573-579. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960

"The Youth of Maxim" (1935) details the conversion of an ignorant factory worker into a revolutionary in the years 1905-1907. The film, as was part of a series, was meant to make Bolshevism attractive, and it engendered censorship controversies when it was released in the U.S. The police commissioner of Detroit, Michigan, acting as censor, banned the film as being "pure Soviet propaganda and likely to instill class hatred of the existing government and social order of the United States." When the ban was challenged in the local courts, it was upheld on the principle that motion picture exhibitors were constitutionally bound to eschew showing films that were either "obscene" or "immoral."

Survivor of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) during WWII. At his insistence his wife, actress Sofiya Magarill, was evacuated to presumed safety in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. She died there in a typhus outbreak in 1943.