Nonna Mordyukova Movies

A family finds itself torn between loyalty to their brother and fear of their domineering mother in this drama from Russia. Four brothers living in different parts of Russia all receive messages asking them to come home to Moscow as soon as possible. A miner in the Ukraine, a sharpshooter with the Army in Tajikistan, a hustler living in Vladivostock, and a jobless man with a string of illegitimate children living in the tundra, the siblings have an unhappy history. As children, their mother organized the family into a music group called "The Happy Family"; they enjoyed brief success, but their fortunes soon faded. In time, Mother (Nonna Mordukova) attempted to hijack a jet to the United States; after a violent altercation with the police, the entire family ended up behind bars, and Father was killed by police (while his sons looked on) when he tried to bribe his way out of the prison camp. A fifth brother, Lenchik (Oleg Menshikov), was wounded while behind bars, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, and he's currently confined to a mental institution. Mother has now gathered her other sons together, hoping that as a group they can rescue Lenchik from the institution. Screenwriter Arif Aliev loosely based this story on actual events. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Andrei is buff, he is muscular, he is ready to bash heads whenever and wherever his much-worshipped mother directs, and his gang is similarly buff, similarly ready to follow the lead of Andre's mother. He has lived a life of competition and conflict with true Russian heroes like his father, who he believed died in Afghanistan, and enemies like Jews and foreigners. For him, after his lounge-singing mother, the muscular movie-star Arnold Schwarzenegger is a god. His mother is a piece of work, using her incestuous relationship with her son to motivate him to go off on rampages to satisfy her bile against all "non-Russians." One day she gets drunk and reveals that Andrei's father is not the soldier he always thought he was, but a Jewish composer and conductor. Thinking she has fashioned her son into the perfect instrument for revenge, she tells him how his father seduced her (making her pregnant) and then did not cast her as a singer for an important role, which blighted her career after that. When Andrei looks up his newly revealed father, he finds an impoverished, gentle man who lives in such chaos that a few new holes in the wall, put there in an anti-Semitic rage by the boy, have no effect on him. Instead, he is proud of his newfound son. Before long, the charms of gentleness and civility have won him over, and he realizes that he must protect his father against his mother and his former gang, still loyal to her wishes. In a film-making note, industry insiders said that many of the skinheads in the gangs in this movie were the genuine article, which lent a specially chilling realism to their anti-everybody performances. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this lengthy romantic comedy, a married pianist runs away from a traffic accident and seeks refuge at an enormous railroad station where he experiences a string of bad luck. But the pianist also meets an older waitress (Lyudmila Gurchenko and the two -- after a long preamble -- start a romance of sorts. A certain amount of satire on the social system and its foibles, as well as slightly erotic segments, and the acerbic train conductor played by Nikita Mikhalkov (an Academy Award-winning director) are a surprise in this otherwise routine interlude at a train station. This was a popular film when released in the USSR because of the two lead actors, but it does not quite come up to the previous standards of director Eldar Ryazanov. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Grigori Chukrai is well-respected director, known in the West for his films Clear Skies and Ballad of a Soldier. Netipichnaya Istoriya, the original title, translates as "An Atypical Story," but the film was soon retitled Tryasina, which means "Quagmire." It shows how mother's blind love transforms her son into a deserter, bringing the boy to a kind of moral and social death. During World War Two, a widow is about to lose her only son to the military. Unable to bear that kind of loss, she engineers an accident just as she is taking him to the train station to begin his enlistment. Secretly, she takes her now helpless son back to her village home, and becomes an eccentric hermit in the eyes of the villagers, rarely venturing outside the house. At home, the boy becomes deeply dependent on her, even though they snipe and jab at one another in an incessant war for dominance. Years after the war has ended, his mother dies suddently of a heart attack. The boy has now become a pale, wizened bag of bones, and emerges from the house like some creature from the depths of the sea. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This Russian-made love story was blessed by Soviet authorities as being entirely wholesome. When Alexei, a struggling and very serious engineer, rescues rich-girl Zhenia from a group of thugs, she is grateful but would have left it at that. Alexei, however, follows up on their acquaintance, and Zhenia forsakes her previous fiancé to marry this stolid young man. Their courtship takes them all over Moscow. After marriage, Zhenia goes to live with Alexei. She is used to the finer things in life, however, and his apartment is extremely tiny and grim. She returns to her parent's home, and he volunteers for a work brigade in the frozen North. One highlight of this film is its very glamorous photography of the city of Moscow. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

During the time of the Russian Revolution, this southern Russian actor has grown fascinated with the idea of a "people's theater," and with art which mirrors the principles of the Revolution. He even calls himself "Iskremas," which means "revolutionary art to the masses." As he and his small group tour in their area, they are constantly in danger from the White counterrevolutionary forces but show great courage and determination. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Directed and co-written by Leonid Gaidai, Brilliantovaya Ruka follows the misadventures of Semyon Gorbunkov (Yuri Nikulin), a kind hearted family man who has the bad luck of breaking his arm while vacationing. As circumstance would have it, a gang of smugglers had been ordered to wait for a fellow thief to stage such an event in the same location where Gorbunkov had quite unintentionally fallen. Under the impression that he was in on the plan, the smugglers whisked an oblivious Gorbunkov to an emergency "clinic" where his cast was filled with several million dollars worth of diamonds before he was sent home. The gangsters quickly realize their bungle, however, and head out to reclaim the stolen merchandise through whatever means necessary. When Gorbunkov finally realizes the value in his arm, he contacts the authorities and begins participating in a highly secret effort to return the diamonds to their rightful owner. With 76.7 million admissions in its homeland, the film was a box-office leader in 1969 Soviet cinema. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide