In connection with the cinema's 100th anniversary, the BBC invited a number of celebrities to choose personal favourites. Michael Douglas picked this neglected Soviet-era classic, thus making full amends for his choice of knitwear in the 'Basic Instinct' disco scene.
Made towards the end of Khruschev's "thaw", when artists were allowed out on a looser rein, the film depicts an accidental hero: a somewhat gormless, naive, gawky country boy drafted into the front line. His bravery is momentary and reflexive but wins him a coveted spot of leave. (The Red Army did not give its soldiers any time off in the ordinary way.) He tries to get back to his home village long enough to put a new roof on his mother's shack of a house, but is delayed en route, and has time only to greet her and say goodbye before returning to duty and death.
Alyosha is swimming against the tide. The Soviets are pushing forward, pushing the Germans out of their land, but he encounters more chaos, misery and stoic endurance than jubilation: a one-legged veteran who fears his wife will spurn him, a mother driving a lorry whose son was killed, a surly rear-echelon private who tries to kick him off the train on which he and his equally shy girlfriend have bummed a ride. The atmosphere of disruption, of thousands of lives turned upside down, is brilliantly accumulated by such cameos with hardly any actual 'action'.
There is no Communist preaching to speak of, and significantly the spoken narrative over the sky at the end says: "He would have been a fine man... but we remember him just as a soldier- a Russian soldier." Not as a Bolshevik comrade, not as a freedom-fighter against fascism: the film is true to the truth of the "Great Patriotic War", in which millions of Alyoshas fought and died for their patch of earth, not for ideology or Stalin.
Chukhrai's later movies have not been seen widely in the West. They should be.
Made towards the end of Khruschev's "thaw", when artists were allowed out on a looser rein, the film depicts an accidental hero: a somewhat gormless, naive, gawky country boy drafted into the front line. His bravery is momentary and reflexive but wins him a coveted spot of leave. (The Red Army did not give its soldiers any time off in the ordinary way.) He tries to get back to his home village long enough to put a new roof on his mother's shack of a house, but is delayed en route, and has time only to greet her and say goodbye before returning to duty and death.
Alyosha is swimming against the tide. The Soviets are pushing forward, pushing the Germans out of their land, but he encounters more chaos, misery and stoic endurance than jubilation: a one-legged veteran who fears his wife will spurn him, a mother driving a lorry whose son was killed, a surly rear-echelon private who tries to kick him off the train on which he and his equally shy girlfriend have bummed a ride. The atmosphere of disruption, of thousands of lives turned upside down, is brilliantly accumulated by such cameos with hardly any actual 'action'.
There is no Communist preaching to speak of, and significantly the spoken narrative over the sky at the end says: "He would have been a fine man... but we remember him just as a soldier- a Russian soldier." Not as a Bolshevik comrade, not as a freedom-fighter against fascism: the film is true to the truth of the "Great Patriotic War", in which millions of Alyoshas fought and died for their patch of earth, not for ideology or Stalin.
Chukhrai's later movies have not been seen widely in the West. They should be.