I’m now re-watching portions of “Subda Cheloveka“, aka “Destiny of a Man”. It’s a Sergei Bondarchuk movie which came out in 1959. Bondarchuk not only directs, but is the lead actor.
Over at Netflix some of the reviewers take issue with the notion that this movie is propaganda. Well, it isn’t ideological propaganda. You could say it’s patriotic propaganda of a very human kind.
I actually enjoyed this movie a lot more than Bondarchuk’s War and Peace that came out in the following decade. The War and Peace extravaganza seemed to be one that was more intent on touching important points that an audience familiar with Tolstoy’s book would expect to see. Some coherence was lost in the process. This seems to be often the case with literature made into movies. Subda Cheloveka is based on a novel, too, but for whatever reason, didn’t seem to suffer from the usual malady.
Bondarchuk’s character, Solokov, goes through a long series of war-time horrors, and loses his family while in a German prison camp.
One part that was amusing to me was the part where Solokov gains the respect of his captors. And how does he do that? If it was an American movie, the conceit might be that American cinema is the wonderful thing that will open up the hearts of the foreigners. That’s how it worked with Brad Pitt and the Dalai Lama in “Seven Years in Tibet.” But the Russians have something different to offer: their drinking prowess. The Germans were about to shoot him for an impolitic remark when Solokov showed them how he could put down the liquor. So they instead ended up admiring him as a good soldier, making him a trustee and giving him the job of chauffeur to one of their officers. I suspect it tells us more about the Russian self-image than anything else, just like that stupid Brad Pitt movie tells us about the peculiar conceits of Hollywood movie makers. (I say this because I’ve seen both themes more often than in just these instances.)
And that leads to a question. Did such things really happen? No, I don’t mean the part about the Germans being so impressed by his ability to chug hard liquor. I mean the part about making him a chauffeur. Could such a thing have happened, that they would trust a prisoner to that degree? Was the ability to drive a vehicle so rare and the manpower shortage so severe that they would have dared let a Russian do it for them?
That’s my main question about historical accuracy. I also have one about human behavior. At the end the war is over and Solokov has lost his entire family. He ends up pulling himself together when he adopts a starving, homeless urchin. When he “reveals” himself to the boy as the father he had hardly known, I’ll bet a real-life boy would be somewhat reserved at that point. Even under those circumstances, real-life affection would take some time to grow.
But for real-life enjoyment, it doesn’t matter a lot. The movie is an obvious tearjerker, and that’s just fine. I liked it. There were some good scenes of the Russian countryside and of life in pre- and post-war Russia to help it along.