Anniversary of The Destiny of a Man
On April 12, 1959, Sergei Bondarchuk's film "The Destiny of a Man" was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas.
The film is based on the story of the same name by Mikhail Sholokhov, published in the Pravda newspaper on December 31, 1956 and January 1, 1957. Mikhail Sholokhov based his story on a story told to him by a casual acquaintance in 1946. The publication of the story caused a huge number of critical and reader responses. The editors of Pravda received letters not only from all over the Soviet Union, but also from abroad. In particular, Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway sent their rave reviews. According to the story "The Destiny of a Man", Yuri Lukin, a permanent editor of Sholokhov's works since the 1930s, and Fyodor Shakhmagonov, Sholokhov's literary secretary, wrote a screenplay published in Literaturnaya Gazeta in October 1957. The screen version of the story was decided to be carried out by Sergei Bondarchuk, who by that time had already been awarded all kinds of titles and regalia as an actor and decided to try his hand at directing.
The first experience of the young director was a huge success. In the first year the film was shown, it was watched by 39.2 million Soviet moviegoers. As a result, the film was recognized as the best film of the year according to the results of a poll by the Soviet Screen magazine. In August of the same 1959, the film was awarded the Grand Prix of the Moscow International Film Festival. The film did not participate in other prestigious international film festivals. Nevertheless, "The Destiny of Man" was demonstrated in a number of European countries. In July 1961, the premiere of this film took place in New York.
The New York Times film columnist Bosley Crowther, on duty, responded to the premiere with a review, not failing to let poison be into it:
"AGAIN the Russians have sent us a stinging film about the horribleness of war, told in terms of the experience and suffering of a Russian soldier captured by the Nazis in World War II....Be advised that it is not a pleasant picture or even a spiritually uplifting one. For the better part it is a hideous and uncompromising account of the brutalities and indignities that are endlessly heaped upon the hero and his fellow Russian prisoners as they are herded as slave laborers into Germany."
Then Crowther listed unpleasant (for him) moments: how Russian prisoners of war strangle the "informer", how the hero of the picture is bitten by dogs after his unsuccessful attempt to escape, and many others. Well, after the famous scene with drinking vodka the film, according to Crowther, becomes “pathetic and sentimental”. By Bosley Crowther July 11, 1961
The limited outlook and ideological narrow-mindedness of the columnist of the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party of the United States did not allow him to identify the main feature, the main pecularity of this film by Sergei Bondarchuk. This feature, and at the same time the colossal merit of this work of the two pillars of Soviet culture, was noted by one of the most respected Russian film critics Sergey Kudryavtsev, who noted in his review that
“The Destiny of Man” was almost the first cinematic work about the fate of captured soldiers during World War II - after all, this topic was practically forbidden before, of course, the protagonist Andrei Sokolov does not fall into the Soviet camp after being with the Germans - he gets some kind of indulgence from the army colonel, having delivered an enemy major with valuable documents to the location of our troops, but all the episodes, beginning with the capture of the driver of a lorry damaged during the bombing and ending with his impudent flight in a German car, were just new for Soviet cinema in which prisoners of war were not considered people at all for more than a dozen years ... Some of them are baptized at the entrance to the temple, someone experiences insurmountable torment and generally sacrifices themselves, not daring to defile the sanctuary by the administration of estes of need, someone shows truly Christian care for their neighbors, even as a Jew and probably an atheist, and someone (and this is Sokolov) decides to violate the commandment “Do not kill”, in order to save another person who is guilty only that he is a commander and a communist. Such a statement of “eternal questions” about life and death, about faith and oath-crime, about humanity and betrayal is also unusual for post-Stalin cinema, which has just begun to revise and re-evaluate all kinds of dogmas that have existed for decades. "
It should be noted that the vision and appreciation of the film by the columnist of The New York Times does not at all reflect the impression and appreciation of the film by most Americans who were allowed to watch this film. For example, a well-known American expert on Soviet culture and cinema Dennis Grunis, who is very difficult to suspect of sympathy for the Soviet regime and Soviet culture, wrote about this film:
"A legendary film, Destiny of a Man (Sudba cheloveka) is in fact one of the few notable Soviet films of the 1950s. This is in part due to the fact that Nikita Khrushchev, who replaced Josef Stalin as the Soviet Union’s premier in 1953, lacked his predecessor’s interest in cinema as a tool of propaganda, both domestically and beyond. Another factor is the financial drain that the Cold War imposed on the U.S.S.R., which, added to the lingering costs of the Second World War, conspired to make the national film industry a lower priority than it once had been. Finally, and most importantly, the inspiration of Soviet artists had suffered a retreat as Soviet communism had steadily withdrawn from idealism, settling into the stultification of an entrenched, nonresponsive bureaucracy. The passion, the vision, and even much of the ideology were all gone.....Watching this film is a heart-battering experience, and if tears shed were my barometer for determining what constitutes a great work of art I would add my voice to the consensus of praise. Destiny of a Man reduced me to hysterics. It isn’t just the extent of loss that Sokolov endures; it’s the film’s unsentimental treatment of both this loss and the man’s agony. ...Bondarchuk’s film is a substantial and serious film about war. Everyone should see it, especially since my less enthusiastic opinion of it is so out of whack with the film’s celebrated status. I said I was skeptical about the film, but I am skeptical also about being skeptical."
And no matter how hard Crowther tried at one time to spoil the impression of American moviegoers from this film (since it was not possible to stop its demonstration on the screens of American cinemas), the American viewer, according to IMDB, highly appreciated Bondarchuk's debut film, assigning it a rating of 7.9 . Well, the world audience rated the film even higher: 82% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave "The Destiny of a Man" ratings from 8 to 10. And 42% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten". With that said, the rating of Sergei Bondarchuk's film "The Destiny of a Man" according to FilmGourmand was 8,493, thanks to which the film took 325th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
I dare to suppose, but only to suppose, and not to assert, that the success of the film "Fate of a Man" to some extent contributed to the fact that Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (formally, for the "Quiet Flows the Don", which was written decades before), and Sergei Bondarchuk in 1969 received the Academy Award for "War and Peace".
