This story of a Russian soldier on leave in the middle of The Great Patriotic War, as it's called in Russia, was directed by Chukhrai in 1959, a period of detente. I wonder if there are instances in which you can judge the political health of a nation from the quality of its films. When Czechoslovakia was loosening up ten years later, a number of quality movies were produced before the Soviet crackdown, and now that China is, if not being internally liberated, at least sliding sideways into the global village, we're beginning to see some admirably done Chinese films. Is there some causation involved? Probably not.<br /><br />"Ballad of a Soldier" was one of a pair of films that showed up in America at about the same time, the other being "The Cranes are Flying." This one won an Academy Award nomination.<br /><br />It deserved it too. The direction, acting, and photography are fine, and Mikhail Ziv's orchestral score is different from what we've become used to. Not necessarily better, but not Hollywood either.<br /><br />Vladimir Ivashov is a nineteen-year old, handsome, innocent-looking soldier at the front who manages to knock out two German tanks by himself. The scene was stunning for 1959. Ivashov runs pell mell with the tank pursuing him across the fields. The camera is perched on a crane and the man and the tank run towards it. Then they run UNDER the camera and PAST it, and the camera turns upside down to follow them from behind. Now, we're used to all kinds of camera tricks but this shot was truly novel at the time.<br /><br />Here's another incident from that same chase that would STILL be refreshingly innovative in an American war movie. The exhausted Ivashov finally falls into a trench, where he finds a primitive anti-tank rifle. The monstrous Panzer rises over Ivashov's trench, about to crush him, and he puts a huge bullet through its sensitive underside. Now, in any modern film, this calls for a stupendous explosion and a fireball ballooning upward. Here, the mortally wounded tank simply stops, groans for a moment, then whines as it slides slowly back down the berm and halts. A moment later, there is a plume of black smoke. That's it. That's how the tank is stopped. A second tank is disabled at a greater distance and with no more fanfare than the first.<br /><br />Almost everyone in the movie is good natured. There are a few guards and an unfaithful wife to be met with along Ivashov's way home, but no one is bitter for very long. There is nothing about the dirty Krauts. The name of Stalin is never mentioned and no one has a speech about Mother Russia. The dirtier parts of the Great Patriotic War are absent: nothing about putting slackers in line and marching them towards the Germans to be mowed down, so that the enemy's positions would be revealed. It's not a NICE war. Good people die, or are betrayed or disabled. But it could be war anywhere at any time, in which the best thing that could happen in the war is that it ends.