Viktor Proskurin Movies

This Russian film is an updated version of Bertold Brecht's stage play. Brecht's plays always highlight the intersection between politics and life as it is lived, and his play, The Career of Arturo Ui is no exception. The story is about Arturo Ui (Aleksandr Filipenko) and his progress from being a penniless unknown to becoming someone with totalitarian power. The model for Arturo was originally Hitler, but in this film parallels are also drawn to the rise of Stalin, and to the new socialists seeking power in post-Soviet Russia. Slogans from Russian political campaigns are used for this purpose to chilling effect. Often, as in this play, Brecht collaborated with Kurt Weill to bring music to his stylized dramas, and as a result many of his plays occupy an ill-defined territory somewhere between classical Greek drama and the contemporary stage musical. Here, that music is supplemented by contemporary Russian folk music. The film retains many stage values; most actors appear in very stylized makeup, and the film's settings are very limited and contained. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Tanya (Natalya Chernyavskaya) marries her young man (Valery Nikolaev) after she becomes pregnant. He soon leaves her to pursue a moneymaking scheme in Siberia which turns sour and lands him in jail. In the meantime, she has been living with her mother and earning a living in as a stenographer (someone who records what they hear verbatim using a stenograph machine and then transcribes it). She has been augmenting her salary by helping out a journalist (Viktor Proskurin) who has fallen in love with her. Meanwhile her husband has been paroled but can't leave Siberia. Tanya travels to see him while mulling over an offer to spend two years in Australia with the journalist. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Viktor is a highly successful and wealthy actor. For years, he has sought distraction from his inner poverty through his relationships with women. In this movie, his marriage to an emotionally overwrought woman comes under strain when he hops into bed with a teen-aged adorer. However, this isn't the relationship his wife should worry about. The actor has a far more sinister relationship with a plain, hard-faced woman who expresses her deep contempt for the actor. The more she does so, the more he loves her; the more he loves her, the more contempt she shows. Eventually, he comes to see that these relationships are mirrors of his inner life -- which arouses him to despair, as he cannot bear to own up to this. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In 1987, director Alla Surikova scored enormous success in her home country with Chelovek S Bulvara Kaputsinov, an engaging slapstick comedy about an idealistic film projectionist trying to introduce the Old West to the nascent art of motion pictures. This film, aptly named Choknutye / Crazy People, features another idealist, an Austrian engineer (Ulrich Pleitgen) who comes to 19th century Russia to build the first railroad. A group of aristocrats sees him as a direct threat to their thriving stagecoach business and they employ elaborate schemes to thwart his project. However, with the help of a dashing lieutenant (Nikolai Karachentsov), a double-dealing agent of the secret police (Leonid Yarmolnik), and a mysterious young woman named Maria (Olga Kabo), he manages to get the czar's approval. ~ Yuri German, Rovi

The book this film was based on was banned in the U.S.S.R. for several decades, and its author Boris Pilnyak "disappeared." This alone makes this film an important statement. The book was saved from oblivion during the Gorbachev era. The book and film together represent yet another stage in the ongoing reappraisal of Stalin's legacy. Mikhail Frunze was an important military figure during the Russian Civil War. He was appointed a minister of defense after the removal of Trotsky, because Stalin thought that Frunze would be loyal to him. Frunze failed to live up to Stalin's expectations and died suddenly -- or so everyone was told. The story is set in 1925 and concerns the sudden "resignation" due to sickness (poisoning) of Mikhail Frunze (Vladimir Steklov), whose appointment as U.S.S.R. defense minister happened when Stalin was taking the reins of power into his hands and was implementing his lifelong practice of killing or imprisoning anyone he felt threatened by. As he dies, the popular veteran reflects on the consequences of his excessive loyalty to Stalin (Viktor Proskurin). ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Panoramic, spectacular landscape shots enhance this wartime action film, but its emphasis on the philosophical and moral issues between Communists and fascists might be long-winded for some audiences. The setting is World War II in a divided and battered Yugoslavia. As the underground Partisans do the best they can to subvert Nazi domination, tension slowly increases. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This story concerns Captain Blinov (Viktor Proskurin), who is a border patrolman on leave visiting his mother. As a dutiful son, he delivers some books to Elena (Vera Glagoleva), a divorcee with a mind of her own. The Captain soon finds himself helping her solve a problem with a difficult neighbor by posing as her lover. It does not take long for this pose to become reality, as he soon falls in love with the independent Elena. However, he is too polite to make any advances and contents himself with accompanying her around town on her job. Nevertheless, his reticence may prove disastrous when he discovers that there is another man in Elena's life, and he leaves for his frontier post in a huff. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Director and lead actor Sergei Gerasimov has focused on the last days of Leo Tolstoy's life, and while he has a screen presence as Tolstoy, the three-hour length is a bit long for the amount of story there is to tell. At the end of his life, Tolstoy was taken with a rustic mysticism, and was even more dedicated to helping the peasants (he wrote a reading primer for them earlier). He spent much of his life maintaining a deep faith in God and advocating a resistance to "evil," the resistance of a pacifist since he promoted non-violence as his personal creed. In his last days, he and his wife have disagreements, and he finds an outlet for his intellectual ruminations with his own physician. Then he leaves home one night in the dead of winter, coming back many hours later with his physical and mental state in rapid deterioration. After three days he leaves again and goes to a railroad station where he dies in the home of the station master. His unusual behavior was motivated at least in part by his repulsion for his wealthy manor. Tolstoy's last days are covered in this film like a stack of separate note cards that are picked up and laid down one at a time, each examined for its own content. With more exploitation of the medium, Gerasimov could have achieved a fluid coordination, and a seamless tale. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi