Returns Policy
If you are unhappy with your purchase, you can return it to us within 14 days. More details
MovieMail's Review
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.
"Masterpiece rediscovered" -
Anonymous on 6th June 2010
Bondarchuk's Destiny of a Man (Sudba cheloveka) not only has a tremendously efficient technique, but also tells one of the most tender stories ever to hit the big scre... more >
Bondarchuk's Destiny of a Man (Sudba cheloveka) not only has a tremendously efficient technique, but also tells one of the most tender stories ever to hit the big screen. His first film is not only mature; it's also a giant: the actions sequences could bring Spielberg to tears, for this work of art was made 40 years earlier. The character suffers greatly in the span of the whole WW2, as the importance of this human drama acquires universal values, and the final statement, different to people's beliefs, is not propaganda but the scream of the common Russian man for whom the war hit the hardest. There is a common theme here, as seen on Bondarchuk's They Fought For Their Motherland: the story of a single or small group of soldiers condenses the entire feeling about world conflict.
A very beautiful tale told masterfully in a normal length. Not to be missed!
(I don't know why someone gave the DVD a 1-star rating... I own the same and it's perfect, featuring extras on Sholokhov, Bondarchuk and the film) < less
