A WWII Soviet soldier is captured by the Nazis but strives to escape and return home to his family.
Another of those great Russian war films from the late 50s/early 60s, which, as with Japan, seems to have been the nation's best era for cinema. The quicksilverlike photography is predictably superlative, and there are solid performances all round, especially from the lead, Sergey Bondarchuk, who also directed the film.
There's a number of clumsy transitions between scenes in the last half hour of the film that don't really work, and it perhaps runs a little out of steam once he has escaped, but that's about the most I can come up with in terms of criticism, and the final impression one takes away is less of battlefields than the healing, rebuilding and moving on from them that has to take place afterwards.
Well worth watching if you're in the mood for a 90-minute war epic, alongside The Cranes are Flying and Ballad of A Soldier.
Another of those great Russian war films from the late 50s/early 60s, which, as with Japan, seems to have been the nation's best era for cinema. The quicksilverlike photography is predictably superlative, and there are solid performances all round, especially from the lead, Sergey Bondarchuk, who also directed the film.
There's a number of clumsy transitions between scenes in the last half hour of the film that don't really work, and it perhaps runs a little out of steam once he has escaped, but that's about the most I can come up with in terms of criticism, and the final impression one takes away is less of battlefields than the healing, rebuilding and moving on from them that has to take place afterwards.
Well worth watching if you're in the mood for a 90-minute war epic, alongside The Cranes are Flying and Ballad of A Soldier.