Word: sasha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first act for the archetypal boring, Chekhovian party. Thirteen characters saunter about, titter, and listen through their earhorns to the tittering of others. At the fall of the first-act curtain this same group swarms in with sparklers, pouring around the shocked Vivien Leigh who is staring at Sasha (Jennifer Hilary), the neighbor's daughter, in Ivanov's arms. Gielgud jars the audience, giving them perhaps two seconds to take in the entire scene...
...career he was terrible. Miss Leigh might have played Ivanov's genteel, tubercular wife as a little more ill and a little less sweet, but simply coughing louder could not have added depth to a structurally shallow role. Miss Hilary is given two types of lines-one shows that Sasha is strong-willed and the other that she is tender. Miss Hilary plays the girl as strong-willed and tender. Chekhov makes it very difficult to pay attention to either of them...
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...
Soon Aleksei takes to drink, battle-scarred and bitter because his wartime honors are withheld by Stalinist officials who cannot believe that any trustworthy Red could have survived a Nazi prison camp. He will have to fight for what is due him, says Sasha. "Against whom?" rages the former hero. "In the war, we knew who our enemies were. Who? Who is guilty? What's happening to us? Are we lying to each other? Are we splitting with the party? I am a man, dammit, and I need the truth!" At local party headquarters he tries...
...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 for a photographer beside her drill press. She is alone, an unwed mother, sick with despair, but the picture is published over the caption: "Sasha Lvova finds happiness in her factory. She has enlarged her quota 163%." Director Chukhrai seems fully aware that pravda is stranger than fiction...