Best known today for War and Peace (a four-part, epic masterwork that was as ambitious in the 1960s as Abel Gance’s Napoleon was in the 1920s), Sergei Bondarchuk made his directorial debut, Destiny of a Man, in 1959. He stars as a war-weary Soviet soldier at the close of the Second World War, who, having survived a Nazi concentration camp, clinging to the hope that he will be reunited with his family, learns at war’s end that his wife and children have been killed. The scene in which he adopts a forlorn, orphaned boy – telling him that he is his long-sought father, which he clearly is not – is one of the loveliest moments in postwar cinema. This melancholy hymn to the human spirit, based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, became a spectacular, worldwide hit. Together with Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959), it began a great humanist tradition in Soviet cinema, and marked out Bondarchuk, along with Andrei Tarkovsky, as the spiritual and artistic heir to Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko.
This was Sergei Bondarchuck’s debut feature which he not only directed but also acted the main part of Andrei Sokolov in the screen adaptation of Nobel Prize winning author Mikhail Sholokov’s novel.
Beautifully crafted and acted, the film is a moving account of an ordinary Soviet citizen during the desperate fight to protect the motherland from Nazi invasion in WWII. In the course of the struggle, Sokolov is captured by the German invaders and despatched to a concentration camp in which the inmates are mercilessly worked and ill-treated. The only thing that urges him to cling on to life is the thought of being reunited with his family when the war is over.
Essentially a morality tale of humanity ultimately triumphing over evil adversity, the film, on its 1961 release (two years after it was made), was a great worldwide success and an eye-opener to western audiences who assumed Soviet directors could not break free from their propagandist yokes. It launched Bondarchuck on his career, which went on to include such landmark films as They Fought for Their Motherland, Waterloo and War and Peace.
Partition (McMullen, 1987)
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Destiny of a Man
