Word: ballads
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...Ballad of a Soldier (in Russian). The vehemently original, vibrantly beautiful, richly humorous story of a 19-year-old soldier's furlough trip across battle-churned Russia is the best Soviet film since...
...Ballad of a Soldier (Mosfilm; Kingsley-Frankel). A Russian soldier scuttles like a desperate bug across an open field. Like a big grey toad, a German tank relentlessly pursues him. Bullets frisk about his heels. He dodges, drops his gun, falls, runs on, gasps, reels with exhaustion. The screen reels, tilts crazily, tilts further . . . Suddenly the image is upside down, the world is upside down. Yet still across a sky of mud the soldier flees, and still the tank pursues...
Released in the U.S. less than a year after The Cranes Are Flying (TIME, Feb. 22, 1960), another Soviet film of bone-jarring energy and independent spirit, Ballad suggests that a New Wave may just possibly be rising in Russian cinema. Cranes made some mild but definite criticisms of the Communist society; Ballad simply ignores it, as though it were not there...
...Have to Stay, concerning a pair of lovers squabbling on the phone over an anonymous third party ("Should I hang up/ Or will you tell him/ He'll have to go?"). Before he had even gone, RCA Victor was out with Tell Laura I Love Her, a ballad gurgled out to his beloved by a dying stock-car racer. Laura herself (Songstress Marilyn Michaels) provided the inevitable followup: Tell Tommy I Miss Him. Dazzled at the prospects, the record companies have issued Save the Last Dance for Me and I'll Save the Last Dance for You; Please...
...Virgin Spring (in Swedish). Ingmar Bergman's mythical and violently beautiful miracle play, derived from a medieval ballad about a farm girl's rape-murder and her father's vengeance, is as clear and grave as a Mass...