Word: chukhrai
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Clear Skies, which took top honors for Russia at the 1961 Moscow Film Festival, will interest Westerners chiefly because it lets the light of day shine on some ideas new to the insular world of Soviet cinema. Director Grigori Chukhrai, who proved his talent with the sensitive, romanticized Ballad of a Soldier, tells a tale of illicit love-and tells it straight, without prudish apologies, against a background of post-World War II political tyranny. The off-screen villain of the piece is Joseph Stalin...
BALLAD OF A SOLDIER. The best Russian movie since World War II: Director Grigori Chukhrai's tender, sentimental, humorous, passionate, imaginative story of love without benefit of Lenin in a Russia without time for love...
With this brilliant cinemetaphor of war's madness, Director Grigori Chukhrai begins the best Russian movie made since World War II-a vehemently original, beautiful, humorous, patriotic, sentimental journey through war-churned Russia...
...conclusion-in which the hero reaches home so late that he scarcely has time to kiss his poor mother goodbye before he rushes away to die-covers the steppes as far as eye can see with the Russian equivalent of smarmalade. Also hard to take: Director Chukhrai's fuzzy-focus, pas de deux romanticism and his bright young mannerisms as a cinematographer. Nevertheless, Chukhrai emerges in this picture as an exuberantly gifted moviemaker. The best of his camera work has force and a creative gaiety. He makes inspired use of sound, silence, rhythm, and a wonderfully witty and expressive...
Perhaps the most obvious of Chukhrai's talents is his surefire sense of comedy. The poor hilarious schlemiel of a train guard, for example, might have shuffled right off one of Gogol's funniest pages. But certainly the deepest of his gifts is his vital, life-accepting sense of humor. In the film's strongest scene, a rabble of Russian soldiers, ragged and cold and hungry, roll through the night behind the battle lines like cattle stacked in a boxcar and heading for the knacker. They look at each other, they look at what life has done...