A Man & a Boy

Fate of a Man (Mosfilm; United Artists), the agonizing story of a village carpenter whose life is shattered by war, is among the best of the Soviet films, most of them rather disappointing, seen in the U.S. during the current three-year-old cultural exchange. Freely sentimental and seeded now and then with propaganda, the film nevertheless tells a harsh tale unforgettably and well. Hero Sergei Bondarchuk. who directs his own performance with skill, is a broad-faced, stocky man, clownish and touching as a young father, convincingly indomitable as a prisoner in German work camps. Finally he escapes, but life is pitiless; his wife and daughters have been killed in an air raid, and his son dies at the front.

He slogs through his days dulled with despair, not even bothering to stew himself with vodka. Then he sees a five-year-old orphan boy gnawing at a melon rind. Out of pity and his own sorrow, he tells the child that he is his father. The boy is not really fooled, but he accepts the pretense with joy. The two walk off down a mud road to the man's village, where he will take up life as a carpenter again.

It would have been easy to turn such a story (written by Mikhail Sholokhov, author of And Quiet Flows the Don) into an annoying cornet solo on the unbreakable spirit of Mother Russia. The horns are heard, of course, but Actor Bondarchuk's performance is far too good for them to be oppressive. His hero is a man; when fate reduces him to flotsam, it is a grievous loss, and when he finds the little boy, his relit face shows love. For the most part, Bondarchuk directs as well as he acts. Some of his visual effects are excellent, and with one in particular--a scene in which the delirium of the exhausted escapee is symbolized by the waving of a grainfield in which he lies--he is as good as Ingmar Bergman.

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