Nine Days of One Year
On March 5, 1962, the premiere of Mikhail Romm's film "Nine Days of One Year" took place at the Rossiya cinema in Moscow.
The film by Mikhail Romm was watched by almost 24 million Soviet moviegoers, or almost 11% of the population, during the year. According to a 1963 Soviet Screen magazine poll, the film was recognized as the best Soviet film of 1962.
Three months after the premiere, Mikhail Romm's film "Nine Days of One Year" was presented at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where it was awarded the highest prize - the Crystal Globe. Among the 25 nominees for this award was, in particular, Pier Paolo Pasolini's film "Accattone". At home, in the USSR, in 1966 the film was awarded the Vasilyev Brothers State Prize of the RSFSR.
The perception of the film by film critics cannot be characterized as unequivocal. One of the patriarchs of Russian film criticism, Naum Kleiman, recalled in 2000:
“I must say that my generation of VGIK (ALL-Russian State Institute of Cinematography - FG) students took "Nine Days of One Year" very critically. Firstly, long before filming, Romm read the entire script to us, sitting on stage. He wanted to know our reaction. ... He wanted to know our opinion, and we never understood what he was going to make of this script. And then he made a film and showed it to us. There was silence after the film. Finally, someone said: " Well, some of the episodes are very interesting, and also Smoktunovsky's acting... one can praise this and that... but the film itself is "tiny", a fake". That was the reaction of VGIK. Although for Romm the film was a step forward. But for us it wasn't enough anymore."
To understand the reason for such a "sour" reaction, you need to remember who Mikhail Romm is. This director was a real classic of Soviet and, one might say, Stalinist cinema. He was the author of such pictures as "Lenin in October", "Lenin in 1918", "Dream", etc. It is known that Khrushchev's report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU condemning the cult of personality literally plunged this director into a stupor. Five years after that, he could not film anything. And the film "Nine Days of One Year" was the first after such a long inactivity. And during this time, many so-called "thaw" films appeared in Soviet cinema, for example, "The Cranes Are Flying" and "Letter Never Sent" by Mikhail Kalatozov, "The Forty-first" and "Ballad of a Soldier" by Grigory Chukhrai and others. And young film critics, like Naum Kleiman at that time, expected something more revolutionary.
In this regard, probably, the assessment of the film made by the great scientist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was more balanced and fair. He recalled:
“Initially, Romm turned to Prof. Vasily Semenovich Emelyanov, then head of the Department for the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy, for materials for the future film. (Emelyanov is an old Bolshevik, author of several books of memoirs; in the 60s he appeared in "Pravda" with sharp attacks on the writer Viktor Nekrasov for belittling the role of the working class, also in connection with the cinema.) What Emelyanov told Romm - I do not know, he loves and knows how to talk. But he sent Romm to I. E. (Tamm-FG) with Igor Evgenievich Romm spoke several times ... The hero of the film - Gusev - has a name and patronymic reminiscent of mine - Dmitry Andreevich, but he is an experimenter; his father lives in the village (embodies folk wisdom). Romm tried in his film to show the life of scientific-nuclear research institute, the pathos and psychology of working on peaceful (and - behind the scenes - non-peaceful) thermonuclear topics. Initially, I rather liked the film; now it seems to me that it is being spoiled with too much “conventionality” of most situations. For Romm himself, the film was like a transitional step from “Lenin in October” to the wonderful and exciting “Ordinary Fascism”.
Unlike Naum Kleiman, Western film distributors immediately classified Mikhail Romm's film "Nine Days of One Year" as a so-called "thaw" movie, and much earlier than Karen Shakhnazarov, who called Mikhail Romm's film "the most sixties film". Thanks to this classification, the film was widely presented at foreign film festivals and cinemas in Western countries and, as a result, was reflected in the reviews of foreign film critics.
For example, film reviewer of the British The Guardian Peter Bradshaw gave the film 4 points on a 5-point system and noted in his review:
"There is a dark, shadowy expressionism in the film, an occult sense of mystery and danger in the underground corridors of the lab. Irradiation is maybe a metaphor for lovesickness, but perhaps the symbol only works if we understand love to mean love of science, or love of country. This is a story of people who unquestioningly sacrifice personal considerations for the Soviet nuclear cause, and yet this lost love looms alongside the Soviet Union’s nuclear destiny with equal potency."
American film critic Dennis Schwartz in a review entitled “Realistic Cold War set film about idealistic nuclear scientists who care about humanity”, noted:
"Though the film was too monotonous to enjoy, it is artistically directed. But more important, the fiction film allows the Soviets to show their human side and that it’s possible for nuclear accidents to happen at its facilities."
Mikhail Romm's film "Nine Days of One Year" is appreciated by modern moviegoers no less than by the audience of the early 60s. 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Mikhail Romm's film "Nine Days of One Year" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,445, which allowed it to take 346th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
