Yelena Tyapkina Movies

After suffering artistically at the hands of Russian censors (his Asya's Happiness wound up being shelved for two decades for a variety of obscure political reasons), director Andrei Konchalovsky briefly played safe with a brace of elegiac literary adaptations. The first of these was A Nest of Gentlefolk, adapted from a Turgenev story. Put in the simplest possible terms, the film concerns a well-meaning landowner, his adulterous wife, and the woman that he loves. Loenid Kulagin, Irina Kupchenko and Beata Tyskiewicz are the actors comprising this angst-ridden triangle. Originally titled Dvoranskoye gnezdo, the film was also released in English-speaking countries as A Nest of Gentry and Nobiliary Nest. In his characteristic fashion, Konchalovsky handles his material in loving (if slightly mannered fashion). He followed Nest of Gentlefolk with a cinemazation of Checkov's Uncle Vanya (1970), then spent four inactive years before turning out his biggest pre-Hollywood financial success, The Romance of Lovers. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Russian director Sergei Bondarchuk's epic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Voyna i Mir) was the most expensive European film ever made for many years. It certainly had one of the longest gestation periods, with Bondarchuk spending seven years filming the project (the actors noticeably age from scene to scene). In relating Tolstoy's complex tale of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Bondarchuk helmed some of the most graphic battle scenes ever seen, one of which runs nearly 45 minutes. So many horses were killed in these sequences that the film was loudly boycotted in some American cities by the ASPCA. While Bondarchuk is slavish to the source material, he does make a few Hollywood-like concessions to popular appeal; his leading lady Lyudmila Savelyeva looks exactly like Audrey Hepburn, the star of King Vidor's 1956 filmization of the Tolstoy novel. Originally clocking in at 507 minutes, War and Peace was pared down to 373 minutes for American consumption. It became a surprise theatrical hit, and a ratings bonanza when it was telecast on the ABC network in four parts from August 12 through 15, 1972. A big film, to be sure -- but few modern critics consider Bondarchuk's War and Peace a great film, citing its many deadly dull passages and its sappy, operatic finale. The dubbed American version is narrated by Norman Rose. The full Russian-language version with English subtitles is now available on video. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Mark Donskoy, the Russian filmmaker whose fame rests upon his brilliant "Gorky Trilogy" of the late 1930s, came up with another artistic triumph in 1944's Rainbow (originally Raduga). With understandable creative rage, Donskoy depicts life in a Nazi-occupied village at the beginning of World War 2. The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olga (Nataliya Uzhviy), a Russian partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis. Eventually, the villagers rise up against their oppressors-but unexpectedly do not wipe them out, electing instead to force the surviving Nazis to stand trial for their atrocities in a postwar "people's court." (It is also implied that those who collaborated with the Germans will be dealt with in the same evenhanded fashion). Brilliantly acted by virtually everyone in the cast, Rainbow is a remarkable achievement, one that deserves to be better known outside of Russia. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The border alluded to in the title of this film is the one between Siberia and Japanese-held Manchuko. Writer-director A. G. Ivanov endeavors to prove that the Soviet Union is eminently prepared should the warlike Japanese ever decide to invade its territory. Several recent clashes between the two countries are re-created herein with the help of newsreel footage. Each time a stalemate is reached, the film declares a Soviet victory with understandable if not entirely well-founded hubris. On the whole, the newsreel clips are far more persuasive than the stridently restaged dramatic sequences. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This engaging comedy of manners from celebrated Soviet director Boris Barnet finds a young peasant woman (Vera Maretskaya) traveling to Moscow to start a new life. She takes a job as a servant for a oily barber and his wife who live in a crowded tenement. Satirical jabs are taken at bourgeois society and urban problems like labor-union parades, housing shortages, and the crowded conditions of the city. The House On Trubnaya Square was one of the most important Soviet films of the 1920s but was not viewed by western audiences until 60 years after it was released. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi