Only Old Men Are Going to Battle

Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (1974)

В бой идут одни старики

Alexey Titarenko is very talented pilot and brave leader of "Singing group". He also must look after some new cadets and fight together with them against German Luftwaffe planes. Close to Alexey always are his friends, they are all from different parts of the country, but they all became real brothers.

Date of release
1974-08-12
TMDB
7.9 / 10 (144)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
War, Drama, Comedy, Romance
Director
Leonid Bykov

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: RUB 381K
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema

Only "Old Men" Are Going Into Battle is an iconic 1973 Soviet war comedy-drama black-and-white film produced in the USSR about World War II fighter pilots, written and directed by Leonid Bykov, who also played the lead role as the squadron commander.

Filming

A great help in working on the film was provided by Air Marshal, three times Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Pokryshkin, who at one time served in Kiev for 10 years and visited the Dovzhenko Film Studios more than once. Bykov had already asked Pokryshkin to allocate real wartime aircraft for filming, but the marshal initially treated this request warily, since many "passing" films about the war were released in those years.

Filming began on May 22, 1973. At the end of May, filming of aerial combat scenes began.

The pilot wrote out "barrels" and "dead loops" in the sky, and Leonid Fedorovich turned on the camera, pressed the trigger and shouted into the lens: "Serega, cover me! I'm attacking!" After a few takes, the plane would land, I would change the cassette with the film, and the car would rise into the sky again. At the end of the shooting day, Bykov literally fell out of the plane and plopped down on the green grass of the airfield.

In early September, the final scene was filmed, in which Maestro, Makarych and Grasshopper find Masha and Zoya's grave. The emotional severity of the scene turned out to be excessive for Alexey Smirnov. During the rehearsal, the actor grabbed his heart and was taken away by an ambulance. A few days later, Smirnov returned and said that "I won't be able to do this a second time, I'll just die," after which Leonid Bykov left that take in the film.

Actor Vano Iantbelidze recalls the very warm and friendly atmosphere on the set and Leonid Bykov's fatherly attitude to young actors:

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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