Word: grigorie
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...movie's hero, a cossack peasant named Grigori, tries romantic love first; the obstacle is that the girl is alreade married. Grigori's father decides that this intrigue is dishonoring the family name, and to break it up he arranges for his son to marry another local girl, Natalya. Grigori spends the rest of the movie vacillating between...
...contentment with his peasant mistress. Gerasimov's treatment of the final scenes is aimed at portraying an enlightened man undoing past mistakes. What comes out is a picture of a man, like a rat, hopping between sinking ships. He is no homecoming hero at all. He is still Grigori, and everyone in the audience knows...
What sparks of greatness Grigori does show come when he is spearing Germans from horseback in a battle attributed to the first World War, or else beating up a noble who has seduced one of his women. But killing Germans is more or less irrelevant to the movie's main themes--the rise of the peasants and the love life of Grigori--and the attack on the noble comes as a decidedly un-subtle conclusion to decidedly un-subtle presentation of the peasant-noble business. Perhaps the worst incident along this line was the first: the entrance of the party...
Everywhere, director Grigori Chukrai presents the faces and machines of a people at war with truth and with power. Part of the power is gained through a considerable sacrifice in subtlety. All the characters in the film are like figures on a poster: you know almost everything about them at first sight...
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...