By Ken Hall.
A visually rich and fast-paced mythic and historical screen epic…the timing of the new restoration by Mosfilm and Craig Rogers is also oddly appropriate given the current warfare in Ukraine, as the courageous defense of Kiev has featured prominently in newscasts.
This visually rich and fast-paced mythic and historical screen epic, based on a series of byliny or epics from premodern Kiev, should prove a very pleasant surprise to Western viewers perhaps unaccustomed to the sometimes unbridled but typically generous emotionalism of Russian performers and of much of the literature from that voluble culture. The timing of the new restoration by Mosfilm and Craig Rogers is also oddly appropriate given the current warfare in Ukraine, as the courageous defense of Kiev has featured prominently in newscasts.
Refreshingly absent in this grand epic from director Aleksandr Ptushko in 1956 (released 1960 in a cut English version as The Sword & the Dragon) is the stately pretentiousness which often mars examples of the genre. The lead character, broadly and compellingly played by Boris Andreyev, sets the trope of the braggart soldier (dear to ancient Roman comedy) on its ear. We enjoy Ilya’s boasts and threats because of his evident integrity and basic moral virtue, representing for the filmmaker and his folklore sources the best of the Russian peasantry—in other words, the common people as opposed to the boyar (noble) class, which is presented here with few exceptions as effete, rather cowardly, and almost totally self-centered. Such contrasts were of course common in Soviet days, when the film was made, but they resonate nonetheless because of the longstanding inequalities between the aristocracy and the lower classes in Russia. A great virtue of this film, besides its amazingly lush visuals and special effects, is its recourse to humor without that comedy being obtrusive. One might think of Errol Flynn at his best, with his sly class comments and general insouciance, as a parallel to Andreyev playing Ilya both as a young and as an older man. Other notable performances include Shukur Burkhanov as the villainous Tsar Kalin and Ninel Myshkova as Vasilisa, the great love of Ilya’s life. This finely restored film is presented in Russian with English subtitles.
Ken Hall (Ph.D., University of Arizona, 1986; MA, University of NC-Chapel Hill, 1978) is professor emeritus of Spanish at ETSU, where he had taught since 1999, and a regular contributor to Film International and Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon. His publications include Professionals in Western Film and Fiction (McFarland, 2019), John Woo: The Films (McFarland, [1999] 2012), John Woo’s The Killer (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), Stonewall Jackson and Religious Faith in Military Command (McFarland, 2005) and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Cinema (Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1989).