46 years for They Fought for the Motherland

On May 12, 1975, Sergei Bondarchuk's film "They Fought for the Motherland" was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas.

It is generally accepted that the film is based on the novel of the same name by M.A.Sholokhov. This is so and not so. The fact is that no one has ever seen the novel in its entirety. Well, perhaps, with the exception of the author. Only selected fragments were published. And Mikhail Alexandrovich destroyed the written novel shortly before his death. Apparently, too much truth about the war was contained in this novel. So much that even as a Nobel laureate in literature, Mikhail Sholokhov did not dare to publish the novel either at home or abroad, knowing the fate of another Nobel laureate in literature - Boris Pasternak, who did not wait for the publication of his main work, the novel "Doctor" Zhivago", passed it on for publication in Italy.

But even separate fragments were enough to create a masterpiece on their basis. Perhaps it is precisely this fragmentary literary basis of the film that can explain the claims to it from the Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev: “And yet the main miscalculation of this tape, which only claims to be epic in scope, but, alas, deprived of the breath of a military epic, seems to be narrative friability and incompleteness Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel of the same name, which he wrote for many years, with long interruptions, didn’t finish to the end. A certain “wormhole” of the idea was hidden, in all likelihood, in the writer's aspiration (and after him - the director) to give a collective portrait of soldiers who were forced to retreat from the Don along the steppes to the east, up to the Volga, and not to write out especially convex and voluminous images of two or three main characters - for example, Lopakhin, Streltsov, Zvyagintsev. Humanly they are interesting and in their own way even new to Soviet art of military subjects."

But after about a year, another Russian film critic - Evgeny Nefyodov - seemed to object to Sergei Kudryavtsev: “Despite the facelessness already indicated in the title (“they”), it’s not the pictures of battles that first fall into memory, but the images of people carrying a heavy cross of war. People not "in general", but by name - specific fighters, not only not merged into a single mass, but also sometimes radically dissimilar to each other in character, temperament and outlook on life. In essence, they are united by one thing - the Motherland, endangered. All actors are great magnificent".

It is likely that Kudryavtsev could not make out what Nefedov saw, for the reason that his judgment's been clouded by the American blockbuster - Steven Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”. In fact, he does not deny this, as he writes in his review: “But if you suddenly decide to make a comparison between the films “They Fought for the Motherland” and “Saving Private Ryan”, then our work lacks primarily a sense of historical distance in time and how since the holy conviction that the outcome of the battle depended only on each individual person, and the life of one individual is still more important than victory at all costs. Already the names implicitly contrast the impersonal “they” and the specific soldier, albeit with surname, which should certainly be rescued from the front and sent home to his mother."

But regarding this comparison, there is a fundamentally different point of view, emanating, oddly enough, from the American. The author of the video blog Movie Community College, Jeremy Bowling, speaking under the nickname Professor, says that the film by Sergei Bondarchuk literally "tears" Save Private Ryan "to pieces." And, moreover, according to the Professor, both Spielberg’s film and many other American films on military themes are literally “pulled from Soviet military films”. And precisely in order to be able to "rush" from Soviet films with impunity, they are not allowed into American distribution.

Indeed: the film "They Fought for the Motherland", our cinema authorities offered for the nomination for Academy Award as the Best Foreign Language Film, but American film academics did not include it even into the list of nominees. As a result, that year the Oscar in this category was awarded to the film "La victoire en chantant (Black and White in Color)" by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, representing the Ivory Coast. Honestly, I have not seen this movie masterpiece. Maybe someone will share his impressions? It is desirable, in comparison with the film of S. Bondarchuk.

Talking about Soviet films about the war, we have repeatedly drawn the attention of our readers to the fact that they are not allowed to see American moviegoers as part of a common strategy to hide from the inhabitants of Western countries the truth about the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazism. But the American video blogger also discovers another goal of American cinematic protectionism - the creation of favorable conditions for primitive theft. Well, such is the "exclusivity of the American nation."

However, the cinematographic leadership of the USSR contributed to the fact that the film masterpiece of Sergei Bondarchuk and Mikhail Sholokhov remained without honored international film awards. We already wrote about this in a publication dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “The Mirror”. Just in case, we repeat. Maurice Bessy, the organizer of the Cannes Film Festival, very much asked Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography) to present Tarkovsky's film to the festival. Filipp Ermash, the Head of Goskino, promised. But he did not fulfill his promise. With this, Filipp Ermash badly shook the film "They Fought for the Motherland", which was nominated for the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival and had every chance of winning. But the jury of the film festival, annoyed by the behavior of the communist chief of Soviet cinema, “rolled” Bondarchuk's film. Moreover, Bondarchuk’s film did not receive an invitation to any other, more or less significant international film festival. Well, the Palme d'Or in those conditions went to the Algerian film "Ahdat sanawovach el-djamr (Chronicle of the Years of Fire)". Again, if anyone saw this Algerian film, share your impressions.

But, no matter how the communist filmmakers and American film academics jointly tricky over the fate of the picture, the viewer appreciated this work as it deserved. In the Soviet Union in the first year 40.6 million moviegoers watched this film, i.e. 16% of the country's population. But not only 45 years ago, but also a modern viewer praised this film. More than 87% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave this film a rating of 8 to 10, and more than 62% of the users gave the film a maximum score of 10!

Based on the foregoing, the rating of the film "They Fought for the Motherland" according to FilmGourmand was 8.480, making it the 329th place in the Golden Thousand.