Le ciel pur

Grigory Chukrai made the classic "Ballad of a Soldier" a few years earlier in black and white, and I was curious about how he would live up to that standard in a later film. It proved in colour but deals with the same subject - the war and its human consequences, but although the story is better in "Ballad of a Soldier", here it is more complicated and deeper. A hero pilot in the war returns home after the war in a ruined state, maimed for life, and the party that extolled him as a hero as long as he wasn't shot down will now have nothing to do with him and even excludes him from the party, on very curious grounds: since he allowed himself to be captured and didn't shoot himself to avoid it, he is regarded as next to a traitor and at least an outcast. It doesn't help that he explains that he was unconscious when he was captured, and that he later even tried to escape (with the dogs of the guards giving him terrible scars in the bargain), - although a war hero pilot, he receives an inhuman treatment after the war, and he was not alone. This happened in every country that was in the war, and innumerable of these war soldiers ended up as alcoholics or worse. It was a problem that lasted up to 50 years after the war. Grigory Chukrai does not succeed in going into depth with this problem, but only showing it is good enough.

On the whole, it stands a comparison with the masterpiece "Ballad of a Soldier" quite well, and there are some scenes that even surpass it, especially the famous train scene, when women, mothers, widows, wives and daughters, gather on the train platform to salute their men passing by to the frontier, but the train passes too quickly for anyone to be recognized. It is almost as heartrending a scene as the Odessa stairs in "Battleship Potemkin", and there are many scenes here made with equally expressionistic and advanced visionary delicacy.

Yevgueni Urbansky acted masterfully as a soviet pilot who was shut down by anti-air nazi fire, caught alive and put in prison until the war finished. Once back home, hurt but alive, he was suspected of betrayal and collaboration with nazis with the only evidence of his survival. Because of the suspects he was expelled out from the communist party to which he used to be a member. The film is just another accusation of Stalin's injustice with many of the Soviet citizens who heorically fought against Nazi army.

Probably the most daring Soviet movie from Khrushchev's "warming" period, directed by Grigori Chukhrai (whose son Pavel made the Oscar-nominated "The Thief.") Of course, such movie was possible only after Stalin's death when Khrushchev in 1956 denounced the "cult of personality" and all of Stalin's purges. This movie deals with exactly that subject. Chukhrai had a hard and very delicate task on his hands because he had to portray the issue while still following the propaganda guide-lines and affirming the righteousness of the whole communist system, so that the movie would actually pass the censors. What he did was create a story seen through the eyes of a young woman who fell in love with a pilot during WWII. Her lover then was captured by the Germans and, after he was able to return home, was imprisoned as a traitor. When he is released during the Khrushchev period, he attempts to deal with the repercussions of his past experiences, trying to start a new life. The movie, naturally, has a very happy, Soviet-style ending, but it manages to show pretty well the dramatic struggle of a man who genuinely loves his country and tries to undestand what he has done wrong, and his lover who stood beside him all along. I wouldn't say that "Chistoye Nebo" is any sort of a masterpiece (although it's kind of hard for me to judge), but it was an extremely important work for its own time period, and still carries a potent historical significance.

Clear Skies labors under several awkward Soviet film necessities of its period, but it succeeds in creating a convincing story that--unlike Chukhrai's mediocre Ballad of a Soldier--actually forces the viewer to think about the unpleasant realities of recent Soviet history. Chukhrai's skill in handling actors is evident in both movies, but builds to greater impact in Clear Skies. The camera work in Clear Skies is also far superior to the earlier movie--the scene with the train full of soldiers passing through the crowd of crying women is more skillfully shot than anything any American cinematographer was doing at that period. Unfortunately, Chukhrai's special effects for Clear Skies were laughably bad; he would have done better to leave the toy airplanes out of it.

My own suspicion is that critics deem Ballad of a Soldier a classic because it used amateur actors and was shot in black and white, while they overlook the much better Clear Skies because of garish color, relentlessly photogenic characters and soap opera-ish ending make it seem--to them--like merely a somewhat tackier Hollywood film. In fact, it beats a great deal of what Hollywood was doing at that time, in spite of its political baggage.