One of the first directorial works of Stanislav Govorukhin based on the story of Boris Zhitkov “The Mechanic of Salerno”. It would seem, as it is possible from a tiny and fairly simple story to pin the material on a full-length film. But practice shows that this is quite possible with the desire and creativity.
A kind of mixture of disaster film and Hitchcock suspense, and unexpectedly spectacular, despite the obvious minimalism and small budget (black and white film, the dominance of conversational scenes, no beautiful women). Let me remind you. At the beginning of the XX century, a passenger steamer goes across the Atlantic (in the original Italian, in the film Russian). In the middle of the ocean, a fire occurs in the hold due to smuggled barrels with bartolet salt - the temperature slowly but surely rises, it is impossible to extinguish the flame, it is impossible to reach the land by its own course. Before the disaster remains no more than two or three days. This is known to the captain and crew, but not to the passengers. To prevent panic on board, it was decided to go to the nearest trade route on all pairs, and leave the ship there - and for now secretly build rafts from improvised means, since there are not enough boats for everyone. The tension is growing: passengers, without suspecting anything, continue to indulge in idle entertainment, officers in every possible way try to distract them and pretend that everything is going according to plan (allegedly, preparations are being made for the holiday in honor of the captain's name-day), and sailors in four shifts work hard at hard work, and some unconscious are already thinking about fleeing the ship.
The film is a kind of "extended version" of the source material. Short strokes indicate the characters of not only crew members, but also passengers, introduced conflicts between characters and secondary storylines, designed as it were to personify different layers of Russian society of the late 1900s. A ruined nobleman, an opera singer, a merchant with a clergyman, a revolutionary underground man and a guard agent pursuing him, and sailors as the masses. There are many heroes, most get only a couple of minutes of screen time, but almost all are very bright and memorable, thanks to an excellent cast with many stars of the Soviet screen.