eyingfanyi

I have to go on record as a dissenting voice (the only one, apparently) about this movie. At times I was tempted to think that this was a spoof on film noir, if it weren't for the fact that the movie came out before the term itself was coined. The plot is obscure (why did Clifton Webb have to wait to hatch his plan when he did? And what if Mark Stevens had never gone to New York?) and the dialog has enough hard-boiled one-liners for several Damon Runyan short stories. Casting Webb in his part as the effete art collector is an obvious ripoff on "Laura", and I thought Lucille Ball's character was a bit starchy and pat. What I did like was the extremely good use of noir lighting - some of the best! - and William Bendix's excellent portrayal of a very dangerous heavy - a refreshing change from the stumbling, bewildered stooges he usually played.

The fact that Tatyana Doronina has the lead in this movie may lead the casual observer to assume that this a borderline schlocky tearjerker, which was more or less her stock in trade. A summary of the main plot may encourage that assumption, too - Sasha Olevantseva, a housewife on a collective farm, has just moved with her husband and two children into a brand new apartment, which if you lived in Russia in the fifties was a dream come true. A letter comes from a village in the far north, announcing that her husband had fathered a child with another woman, and the child's mother has died. Will you take the child, or turn her over to an orphanage? They adopt the child, which is when the drama starts.

But the story is not so simple. The movie is in fact a very nuanced performance with a variety of sub-themes floating around in the background. On the one hand, the village believes that Sasha is simple-minded for even agreeing to take the child - even her bear of a husband begins to think so, and her own witch of a mother considers it to be a confirmation of Sasha's stupidity and encourages Sasha's own son to pick on the girl. On the other hand, the village officials suspect that Sasha, like a typical stepmother, must be abusing the child. And the child herself is a cipher - totally unresponsive while Sasha does her best to make her feel loved, despite the opposition she personally has to face on all sides. A good movie. Unfortunately, English subs don't seem to be available for the movie any more.

Nobody remembers this movie any more. I'm not even sure that it ever played in any English speaking theaters; I can't find English subtitles for it anywhere. But this movie is a gem.

A story involving an orphan - a common figure in Soviet movies; the Soviet Union had two big generations of orphans, one from the revolution and the civil war and another from World War II. This orphan has been adopted by a well-to-do family in Leningrad and is just finishing college when she finds out that her mother is still alive. The mother is a peasant in a small village who wants to see her daughter. This provides the dramatic setting, with a number of subplots arising.

The two leads, the ballerina-like Lyudmila Marchenko as the orphan and Valentin Zubkov, with his military, masculine persona, as a village official, are shipshape, but the best acting in the movie is provided in two major supporting roles by Vera Kuznetsova, very typically cast as the mother, underplaying a part that could easily descend into bathos, and Nonna Mardyukova as a peasant woman who has a variety of personal demons to deal with.

With the cinematography of Pyotr Katayev, which tells a moving, lyrical tale, effectively using darkness and morning mist in this black and white film in a way that makes you fall in love with the Russian countryside and that sometimes reveals much more about what's going on in the story than the actual action on the screen, and a superb, lush musical score by Yuri Biryukov, you'll wonder why the rarefied, art-house produce of the likes of Tarkovsky and Kalatozov got so much attention by comparison.