Ballad of a Soldier

Ballad of a Soldier (1959)

Баллада о солдате

From the very pages of life itself!

During World War II, earnest young Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is rewarded with a short leave of absence for performing a heroic deed on the battlefield. Feeling homesick, he decides to visit his mother. Due to his kindhearted nature, however, Alyosha is repeatedly sidetracked by his efforts to help those he encounters, including a lovely girl named Shura. In his tour of a country devastated by war, he struggles to keep hope alive.

Date of release
1959-12-01
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (230)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
Drama, Romance, War
Director
Grigoriy Chukhray

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Ballad of a Soldier is a 1959 Soviet war romance film directed and co-written by Grigory Chukhray and starring Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko. While set during World War II, Ballad of a Soldier is not primarily a war film. It recounts, within the context of the turmoil of war, various kinds of love: the romantic love of a young couple, the committed love of a married couple, and a mother's love of her child, as a Red Army soldier tries to make it home during a leave. On the way, he meets soldiers and civilians and also falls in love.

Production

According to longtime TCM host Robert Osborne, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a fan of the director, so Chukhray was given more leeway than normal.

Although the film is set in 1942, the characters wear shoulder boards—insignia that were not introduced into the Red Army until 1943. Chukhray did this intentionally. He anticipated that the film would be distributed in Europe, where the image of the Soviet soldier-liberator had already taken shape specifically in this uniform—complete with shoulder boards.

Originally, Oleg Strizhenov and Liliya Aleshnikova were cast in the lead roles, but they were replaced at the insistence of Chukhray. On the first day of filming (during the scene depicting Alyosha's departure from the front), Chukhray fractured his leg; later, when filming resumed, he contracted typhoid fever.

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

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