Word: chukhrai
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...Goodwin has been replaced by John W. Creighton, former CEO of Weyerhaeuser. DIED. REGINE CAVAGNOUD, 31, world Super-G champion; in Innsbruck, Austria. The French skier died of injuries suffered when she collided with German national coach Markus Anwander during a downhill practice run (see Eulogy). DIED. GRIGORY CHUKHRAI, 80, celebrated Soviet-era filmmaker; in Moscow. A WW II veteran, his major films dealt with war, including Ballad of a Soldier, which won the 1960 Cannes award for best direction. DIED. THOMAS DURANT, 73, assistant director of Massachusetts General Hospital and medical advocate for refugees; in Boston...
...Gregori Chukhrai, who directed the film, emphasizes the individual suffering of all the characters, gives a tragic portrait of a whole people whose lives are disrupted by war. Alyosha, whose naive heroism and perpetual optimism are particularly pathetic in light of his impending death, is an example of wasted potential. He is a man who is only beginning to realize his capacity for friendship, and for love...
...Chukhrai does not hesitate to create sentimental scenes: Shura and Alyosha waving to each other as his train pulls away, Alyosha's mother running breathless and perspiring from her work in the fields to greet him. But somehow, in this context, anything less than sentimentality would be unsatisfactory. War has torn a society apart, and for a few brief moments its victims are struggling to recapture a past forever lost, or discover experiences never known. Absent is the business-as-usual optimism of most American films about the Second World War. There is a sense in Ballad of a Soldier...
...Chukhrai's plucky heroine, Sasha (Nina Drobysheva), left alone during the war, all but flings herself into the arms of a heroic airman, Aleksei (Evgeni Urbanski, the brooding amputee of Ballad). While Aleksei is missing and presumed dead, she bears his child. Miraculously, he returns at war's end, and when Sasha's stuffy brother-in-law objects to their living together, she tells him to go to hell...
...that, Chukhrai offers noteworthy compensations. His film is brimful of humanity and humor. His actors are superb, particularly Drobysheva. Meeting her hero for the first time on a snowy street corner, she turns a blind date into a glorious little ballet of girlish uncertainty. Women at a railway station, waiting for the merest glimpse of their menfolk, watch a troop train roar through at top speed, leaving behind an acre or so of stunned faces that say all there is to say about war's anguish at home. And Chukhrai pumps irony into a sequence that has Sasha posing...