The Cranes Are Flying

What is the story?

Moscow, dawn on 22 June 1941. Veronika and Boris walk together and watch a skein of cranes fly over the city. The Spassky Tower clock strikes four and they sneak home. Hours later the war begins. Though he could get an exemption, Boris volunteers. He tucks a note into a birthday present, a toy squirrel with a basket of golden nuts, and leaves it with his grandmother. Veronika races to the assembly point and never sees him.

An air raid kills her parents and destroys her home, and she moves in with Boris's family, where his cousin Mark, an exempted pianist, pursues her. In another raid, rebuffed, he rapes her. She marries him, and the family despises her as a traitor to Boris. At the front Boris fights a soldier who taunts him about Veronika, is sent on a dangerous reconnaissance, and is shot saving that man's life. In his last moments he sees the wedding they will never have.

The family is evacuated to Siberia, and Veronika works in the hospital run by Boris's father Fyodor Ivanovich. When a patient gets word his girl has left him, Fyodor tells him to forget such a woman, and Veronika takes it to heart. About to throw herself under a train, she sees a little boy nearly hit by a vehicle and rescues him. His name is Boris, and she brings him up. Mark gives the toy to his mistress, and when a guest at a party finds the note inside, Veronika races in and seizes it. Fyodor learns Mark bribed his way out of the draft and throws him out.

The war ends. Veronika runs to the station with a bouquet and searches among the returning men for Boris. His comrade Stepan hands her a photograph, and she finally accepts that he is dead. Stumbling through the crowd in tears, she listens to Stepan's speech on the joy of victory and the grief of loss, and starts handing her flowers to strangers. Cranes fly once more over Moscow.

How was such a film possible then?

It came from Viktor Rozov's play Alive Forever. Until then war in Soviet cinema had meant life at the front. With Ballad of a Soldier (1959) and Ivan's Childhood (1962) this film changed the Soviet war genre by making war the drama of ordinary people. The heroine was new as well: a hero's fiancée who is raped, marries the rapist and tries to kill herself. The scholar Josephine Woll says Veronika shaped post-Stalin film by heralding more complicated heroines. Tatiana Samoilova plays Veronika and Aleksey Batalov Boris.

East German fans gave Tatiana Samoilova a watch inscribed "Finally we see on the Soviet screen a face, not a mask". The French paper Libération contrasted her purity with Brigitte Bardot. Claude Lelouch said he had not seen a more beautiful film from Russia.

What looked so different?

The camera of Sergei Urusevsky. He built the visual design on moving shots and an 18mm ultra-wide lens, and for Boris's death he devised and built circular camera rails. Cannes gave him the top prize of the French technical commission. Moisei Weinberg wrote the score.

How did the USSR take this victory?

At home 28.3 million saw it, and over 5.4 million in France. Yet the 1958 Izvestia note on the Cannes win had no headline or photographs and did not name the director or the writer. The French title at Cannes was Quand passent les cigognes ("When the storks pass"), because a literal translation with grue (also slang for prostitute) and voler (also "to steal") could have read as "prostitutes are stealing".

Who was the director?

Kalatozov was born into a Georgian family in Tiflis. Salt for Svanetia (1930) drew attention, but his next film, A Nail in the Boot (1931), was banned as "politically harmful". He made his place with films on heroic aviators, represented the film committee in the United States in 1943-1945 and headed feature production in 1945-1948. The Cranes Are Flying made him known to the world. With Urusevsky he went on to The Unsent Letter (1959) and I Am Cuba (1964), which were not properly appreciated at the time. He died in Moscow in 1973.