The Forty-first (1956)
Directed by Grigoriy Chukhray

Film Review

It was with The Forty-First that the acclaimed Soviet filmmaker Grigori Chukhrai made his directorial debut, a film that was one of the first to bear witness to the Khrushchev Thaw that followed the long hard Stalinist winter.  Based on a popular novel of the same title by Boris Lavrenyov, the film would have been unthinkable just a few years previously, as it depicts a romance between soldiers in the Red and White Armies and is open to an anti-Communist (or at least anti-ideology) interpretation.  Even in the brief period of censorship relaxation that came about in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, it was a controversial film and its immense popularity at the Soviet box office opened the floodgates for more provocative reflections on the Stalin era.  Entered in the 1957 Festival de Cannes, it failed to get the top prize but was honoured with a special award.

The Forty-First is a visually striking piece of cinema but it has little of the searing emotional power of Chukhrai's subsequent work, most notably his acclaimed masterpiece Ballad of a Soldier (1959).  The film's artistry lies exclusively in the extraordinarily vivid landscapes of sea and sand that are beautifully rendered by Sergey Urusevsky, arguably the Soviet Union's greatest cinematographer.  Urusevsky is best known for his work on Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying (1957) and I am Cuba (1964) but his contribution to The Forty-first is just as praiseworthy and brings an exquisite poetry to what would otherwise have been a pretty tame melodrama.

As daring as it was for its time, The Forty-First suffers from some too obvious attempts to dowse the more subversive elements of Lavrenyov's story with clunky pro-Communist didacticism.  It may not be as flagrantly propagandist as Soviet films of the previous decade but there is a clear attempt to steer the ambiguous tale of conflict between political ideology and genuine human feeling towards an all too recognisably red-painted harbour.  The heroine Maria, played by a fearsome Izolda Izvitskaya, ends up looking more like a Communist figurehead than a convincing human being, although there are a few memorably moving scenes where the mask slips and Maria's humanity manages to puncture its way through her ironclad exterior.  Ultimately, it is the hauntingly mesmeric power of the visuals that redeems the film and makes it accessible to a western audience.

Film Synopsis

In 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, the remnants of a Red Army battalion are fleeing across the Karakum Desert after being routed by the White Army.  They include Maria, a sniper who has already taken the lives of thirty-eight enemy soldiers and who claims two more when the party runs into a camel caravan that is transporting a handful of White Army soldiers.  The man who would have been Maria's forty-first victim, Lieutenant Govorukha, is taken prisoner because he has strategically important knowledge.  When the camels are stolen, Maria's commander orders her to take Govorukha to their headquarters in Kazalinsk by crossing the Aral Sea.  In a violent sea storm the boat sinks and Maria ends up being washed up on a remote island with her prisoner.  Despite their profound ideological differences, the two enemies cannot help falling in love...