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Not just the cranes, but the tracks, the dollies, the lenses are all flying. The trajectory is the heroine's, from Jennifer Jonesoid button-nose to Mukhina sculpture, the plot is a Griffithian frenzy transposed to Soviet soil to take advantage of the end of Stalin's "anti-formalism" rule. Girl (Tatyana Samoylova) and Boy (Aleksey Batalov) scamper through Moscow streets, swooning shifts in angle—very high, very low—offer a world heightened, transformed by emotional urgency. War intrudes, the couple is separated as tracking shots glide across swarming, singing, weeping crowds. Love, initially "a harmless mental illness" and finally "a ride against the forces of Nature," Mikhail Kalatozov's camera dances to it. Borzage and Vidor are the pillars of the ardent technique, alternately evocative of opera (the home front seduction, framed by billowing curtains and scored to Tchaikovsky fugues and air-raid sirens) and silent cinema (the hero's reverie of marriage and happiness, spiraling in the time it takes a shot soldier to hit the mud). A clock ticking excruciatingly amid bombed-out ruins, a Siberia exodus, an overcrowded hospital ward: "This is what's become of Mother Russia," sighs the doctor-paterfamilias. The draft-dodging artist, the ditched infantryman, the farewell message in the stuffed squirrel's basket. It falls to Samoylova to embody smiling-through-tears regeneration in the finale, "she's worth fighting for." (Minnelli's The Clock is absorbed into the mix, so are Potter's The Shopworn Angel and Sandrich's So Proudly We Hail!) A work of thunderbolts, of volcanic partings and reunions and eyes flashing at the audience. To follow up such sensations, only a revolution will do (I Am Cuba). Cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky. With Vasiliy Merkuryev, Aleksandr Shvorin, Svetlana Kharitonova, Konstantin Kadochnikov, and Valentin Zubkov. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |