New Wave in Russia?

Ballad of a Soldier (Mosfilm; Kingsley-Frankel). A Russian soldier scuttles like a desperate bug across an open field. Like a big grey toad, a German tank relentlessly pursues him. Bullets frisk about his heels. He dodges, drops his gun, falls, runs on, gasps, reels with exhaustion. The screen reels, tilts crazily, tilts further . . . Suddenly the image is upside down, the world is upside down. Yet still across a sky of mud the soldier flees, and still the tank pursues him.

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.

Released in the U.S. less than a year after The Cranes Are Flying (TIME, Feb. 22, 1960), another Soviet film of bone-jarring energy and independent spirit, Ballad suggests that a New Wave may just possibly be rising in Russian cinema. Cranes made some mild but definite criticisms of the Communist society; Ballad simply ignores it, as though it were not there.

When the Russian soldier (Vladimir Ivashov) can run no more, he falls in a foxhole, finds a bazooka there, turns it on the pursuing tank, destroys it and another one too. Offered a medal, the hero--who is only 19 years old--begs leave instead to go home and see his mother. His journey is the thread on which three luminous episodes are strung.

In the first of these, the hero meets a soldier (Evgeni Urbanski) whose leg has been amputated. Invalided home, he is ashamed to face his wife as only half a man, decides to get lost instead--"Russia is big." The hero persuades him to go home. They arrive. The wife is not there. The soldier hangs on his crutches, a broken man. Suddenly a woman screams his name. His head snaps up. She runs to him, covers his face with kisses. All at once he sags with relief; a terrible joy fills his face; he crushes her in his arms.

In the second episode, which is interspersed with the third, the hero delivers a precious gift of soap to a soldier's wife, finds her living with another man, snatches back the soap and runs out. "Please," she cries after him, "please understand!" But he is too young.

In the third episode, the longest and most variously appealing of the three, the hero hitches a ride on a train. At a whistle stop, a pretty young girl (Shanna Prokhorenko) climbs into his boxcar. The train starts. "Mamma! " she screams, when she sees the hero. "M aaamaaaaa!" Nervously they make friends. He offers her a bite of salt pork. "Just a nibble," she says shyly. She wolfs the whole pound --raw. After half an hour boy and girl are so innocently and unleninistically in love that only a mad dog of a capitalist could fail to be in love with them too.

The 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 score composed by Mikhail Siv. He casts and directs his players faultlessly--as the legless soldier, Actor Urbanski is massively impressive.

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 to them, and gently one of them grins and makes a joke; another takes it from there, and suddenly all together they laugh and laugh and laugh until fate's narrow boxcar bursts and the theater booms with an immense amen to life.

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