Customer Reviews

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

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I am watching this movie, "The Cranes Are Flying", before the ending and I love it-it is bittersweet.

I was a young soldier, in 1969 South Vietnam, my girlfriend was married by the time I retuned, this very excellent film brought some of those memories back, memories that are met with a greater understanding that, although, life goes on for loved ones left behind, they are visited with hardships of another kind ... that ultimately, things work out the way they are suppose to more often than not.

Put another way: Until further notice-there is always a tomorrow.

The Soviet film industry produced some masterpieces after Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, and The Cranes Are Flying is one of the most fully realized and emotionally moving films of the period.

The war separates two young lovers--they are forced apart without a chance even to say goodbye--and although we know that the young man, Boris, has been killed early on, Veronika maintains hope to the very end despite enduring tremendous hardships.

The final scene, where she is forced to realize that Boris is never coming back, is in one sense heartbreaking but also strangely uplifting when we see what she does with the flowers she had bought to welcome him home. It is only the last of many sequences beautifully photographed in black and white.

Knowing a fair amount about Russian history, I couldn't help noticing that this was a Soviet film about World War II in which the dominant public figure of the period, Joseph Stalin, was never mentioned or alluded to.

During the World War II, a young woman is so impressed and shattered at the news of her lover 's death that she decides to step ahead and accept to marry a man she does not care.

It would seem the multiple consequences left by the war 's wounds are so far to be expected. There are quite interweaved issues and events, that surmounts the frozen concept of the random. The trickery intersections of the fate become raw material for psychologist and hard investigators of the human nature.

This films talks us about the unsaid consequences of the War, even after having survived. In the War you may feed your dreams and hopes, but in the other side there is just a daily anxiety and desperation, and many times this living equation with both variables playing on different sides may clash, breaking the most sublime projects.

An unforgettable classic, that joined with Ivan 's childhood constitute the supreme gems of the Russian Cinema in the Fifties.