During two years of service in World War II as a military cameraman, Sergei Urusevsky learned how to wield a handheld camera with uncanny smoothness, grace, and expertise even when he was running over rough terrain. Urusevsky's passionate cinematography is the strongest aspect of Mikhail Kalatozov's THE CRANES ARE FLYING, a Soviet classic that surprised Russian audiences by daring to depict favorably characters who question the doctrinaire Communist Party glorification of patriotic sacrifice, then went on to win the Palme d'Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

Urusevsky believed that a cinematographer should highlight and emphasize the emotions of the main characters in a movie and that the best way to accomplish this is with a handheld camera. There are many scenes in which he demonstrates this belief with so much urgency and dramatic flair that the effect borders on flamboyance. The story focuses on two young lovers whose lives are disrupted by the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. When Boris (Alexei Batalov) sprints up four or five flights of stairs to say goodbye one more time to his beloved Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova), the camera sprints with him in a giddy rush of romantic intoxication. When Veronica rushes up the same stairs in desperate fear only to discover that her family's apartment has been blown to bits by a German bomb, the camera races with her in lurching, jerky, panicky haste.  When Veronica pushes her way through a huge and turbulent crowd searching for Boris so she can give him a present before he and the other volunteers are sent off to fight on the front, the camera squeezes through the surging press of bodies with her, revealing in one long, continuous, uncut shot how the hopeful look on her face gradually decays into despair. When Veronica tries to resist the unwanted advances of Boris's wickedly handsome cousin Mark (Alexander Shvorin) during a bombing raid, the camera ricochets from one angle to another in a manner that perfectly conveys chaos and pandemonium.  In rapid succession Urusevsky shows Mark's fingers pounding furiously on the keys of a piano as the darkness is punctuated by brilliant flashes of light, the curtains billowing into the room as the piano music is drowned out by a cacophony of explosions, Veronica staggering frantically from room to room as Mark pursues her, and then the painful crack of her hand across his cheek as she slaps him again and again, crying, "Nyet!  Nyet!  Nyet!" When Boris gets shot, the camera focuses on his figure as he somehow remains standing, swaying back and forth, struggling not to fall, then switches to his perspective and shows us the forest spinning dizzily around him, dissolving into memories.

Urusevsky's cinematography is not the only aspect of THE CRANES ARE FLYING that's supercharged with emotion. The actors give strong, intelligent performances (especially Samoilova as Veronica, Vasily Merkuryev as Boris's father, and Antonina Bogdanova as Boris's grandmother), delivering their lines with depths of feeling.  Similarly, the musical score by M. Vainberg swells and overflows with sentiment. And Veronica's beatification in the final scene, when she rises out of the numbness of grief and becomes an angel of compassion who gives the flowers meant for Boris, one by one, to the wounded veterans who have returned without him, blessing each bandaged soldier with the love she herself has lost, is one of the great moments of bittersweet tenderness in the history of cinema, almost as moving as the final scene in Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS.  Josephine Woll calls THE CRANES ARE FLYING "the first indisputable masterpiece of post-Stalin cinema," but the unabashed emotional theatricality of the film means, of course, that your average modern American moviegoer is likely to sneer at it and dismiss it as an overwrought melodrama.

I think both opinions are somewhat extreme. While it may well be true, as Woll contends, that THE CRANES ARE FLYING is vastly superior to any Soviet film made during the last decade under Stalin, and while it is certainly true that CRANES has five or six absolutely wonderful moments, on the whole it is far too stagy to be called a masterpiece.

After Hopscotch and I saw THE CRANES ARE FLYING 45 years ago, I asked her how she liked it, and she replied, "It's okay, I guess, but parts of it are . . . gosh, you know, kind of corny . . . " After Frosty and I saw it two days ago, I asked her how she liked it, and she replied, "It's okay, I guess, but parts of it are . . . gosh, you know, kind of corny . . . " Whether this proves that great minds do indeed think alike or merely that Silman's snobbiest film critic suffers fools gladly, I do not know.