"Such a cinema no longer exists. Goodbye, boys!"

On January 3, 1966, the film "Goodbye, Boys" directed by Mikhail Kalik was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas. Actually, the film was made back in 1964, but for some reason its release on the screens was delayed for some time.

The film was based on the autobiographical story of the same name by Boris Balter, published in 1962 in the magazine "Yunost".

According to Evgeny Nikiforov,

"the director M. Kalik, together with the cameraman L. Paatashvili and the composer M. Tariverdiev, managed to convey the "modest charm" of the pre-war provincial Yevpatoria. And the film was shot not on American color film, but on ordinary black and white "Shostka", managed by very modest means to convey nostalgia for the passing of childhood, and, at the same time, a premonition of future shocks and losses."

Honestly, I learned about the existence of this film thirty years after its release. When the film appeared, I was not even ten years old, and I was more interested in films about Indians, about musketeers, and about scouts. And by the time I grew up to real cinema, the film "Goodbye, Boys" quietly disappeared from the screens, adding to the already impressive "shelf fund" created by the country's communist leadership. As it turned out later, the only reason for the separation of the film from the audience was the departure of its director, Mikhail (Moisei) Naumovich Kalik, to his historical homeland, Israel, in 1971.

Perhaps the film by Mikhail Kalik would have passed me by if it had not been for ... the story of Yulian Semyonov "The Secret of Kutuzovsky Prospect", which fell into my hands somewhere in the mid-90s. Those who have read this novel will understand the connection between it and the Kalik's film. For the uninitiated, I will inform you that the story of the classic Soviet detective is dedicated to the murder of the famous Soviet actress Zoya Fedorova, in which the KGB officers were suspected. And this suspicion was greatly facilitated by the fact that the investigation of this murder, committed in 1981, was very quickly hushed up. And the very mention of this murder in the media was prohibited almost until the beginning of perestroika.

And Zoya Fedorova, as you know, was the mother of Victoria Fedorova, whose cinematic career began precisely with the role in the film "Goodbye, Boys". And the fact that Victoria's father was an American Rear Admiral, romance with whom Zoya Fedorova preferred the "courtship" of the all-powerful Beria, for which she paid with a sentence of 25 years in GULAG, only strengthened my interest in Victoria's work.

However, interest in the film was added by the participation in it of very young and novice Natalia Bogunova, Mikhail Kononov, Yevgeny Steblov, and Yefim Kopelyan, who by the mid-90s had become real stars of Russian cinema.

My impressions from watching the film almost completely coincided with the assessment of Sergei Valentinovich Kudryavtsev, who gave the film 9.5 points out of 10 possible and wrote in his review:

"in this retro story about teenagers from a southern city by the sea in the pre-war period, about the upcoming fate of which we know much more than they themselves, touches and conquers, first of all, not the shaky atmosphere of a ghostly paradise, where those who are destined to die in the war or in Stalin's GULAG, or maybe survive against all odds, but for the rest of their life to keep in their souls an aching feeling of incomprehensible guilt in front of friends who have disappeared forever...The frame is washed and transparent. And the faces are surprisingly enlightened, clean, open. There are no more such faces. And such a cinema no longer exists. Goodbye, boys!"

Modern cinema audiences highly appreciated this film, which was released more than half a century ago and of which 15 years lay on the shelf. 65% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film ratings from 8 to 10.

With that said, the rating of Mikhail Kalik's film "Goodbye, Boys" by FilmGourmand was 7.804, which allowed it to enter the Golden Thousand at number 976.