Russian Without Tractors

Boy meets tractor. Boy loses tractor. Boy gets tractor. Such was the dreary, propagandists plot of most movies made in Stalin's Russia. Enter Comrade Khrushchev, followed by a babble of rumors that tractors were out, humanity was in, and a new generation of genius was about to restore the prestige enjoyed in the '20s by the Communist cinema. Last week, thanks to the recent U.S. -Soviet film-exchange agreement, two of the new Russian films could be seen in the U.S. Genius was not in evidence, but then neither were the tractors.

Swan Lake (Columbia), the less remarkable of the two, is a photographed performance of the well-known ballet set to music by Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, as it is danced by the modern masters of the 19th century tradition, the corps de ballet of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater.

The picture, though filmed in Eastman Color of a particularly somber and romantic richness, has the inevitable inadequacies of photographed theater. The warmth of the living illusion is lost in cold celluloid, and the creative gesture of the camera is frustrated. As the camera wanders uncertainly through the theater, often too close to the action, often too far away, the spectator begins to feel as if he is traipsing about in search of a seat.

The dancing, though, is what matters, and it is magnificent. Maya Plisetskaya, the public favorite among Russia's younger ballerinas, dances the double role of Odette-Odile with a mixture of faultless precision, lyric grace and sheer animal power; Nicolai Fadeyechev as the Prince and Vladimir Levashev as the Evil Spirit are virile, commanding performers. On the other hand, the ballet itself is simply an arrant Arcadian anachronism, and Tchaikovsky's music, except for a few eddies of glorious melody, fills Swan Lake with sugar water. But along with all its faults, the picture provides U.S. ballet-goers who missed the Bolshoi troupe during last year's tour with a useful opportunity to see the best company of classical dancers now at the barre.

The Cranes Are Flying (Warner), which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1958, is a much more exciting experience. With the exception of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, it is probably the best Russian movie seen in the U.S. since World War II.

Made by Mikhail Kalatozov, a middle-aged associate of Eisenstein's, The Cranes Are Flying tells the story of two young students (Tatiana Samoilova and Alexei Batalov) who fall in love just before the Nazi invasion. He rushes off to the army, leaving her a letter of explanation, but the letter is mislaid, and she thinks she has been jilted. When her parents are killed in an air raid, she goes to pieces and lets herself be seduced by a no-good draft-dodger who plays the piano. She spends the rest of the picture in Siberia, nursing wounded soldiers and trying to work her spiritual passage home.

The story is as banal as it sounds, but Director Kalatozov has told it with smashing verve. He has obviously made the picture he wanted to make, relatively free of official interference, and the sense of freedom thrills in every frame. Kalatozov can seldom resist the brilliant angle and the trenchant frame, even when they interrupt the story, and his glorious effects of cutting and lighting are often spectacularly inappropriate. But somehow the vital extravagance of the film engages the spectator and whirls him along in its whirling mood. This mood is personified in Heroine Samoilova, an astonishingly imaginative young actress who is the type of Tolstoy's Natasha--slender, dark, expressive as a flame.

For all its various vitalities, The Cranes Are Flying probably matters less as a work of art than as a revelation of the modern Russian mood. It adds, for one thing, to the mass of evidence that the nation that leads the world in rocketry is still inspired by the romantic ideals of 19th century "servants' literature." The film also suggests that there has been some relaxation of the puritanical morality of the revolution: the heroine errs, but is forgiven at the fade. And there is even a mild suggestion that people in Russia sometimes get tired of the canned ideas they are continually fed--the party's production slogans and political cant ("Fascist beasts") come in for some sly kidding. So do the professional women, the emancipated amazons of Marxist society. But one Cranes does not make a summer.

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