- We're under volcanic bombs! You don’t often find pearls like The Volcano Incident! To say that the movie is funny is to say nothing! This is a real phantasmagoric action, the main genres of which are not adventure at all, but “comedy” and “fiction”. Comedy, because Peter Aleynikov made the director happy with his presence "to the full program", and fantastic, because everything in the picture is fantastic: from the beginning to the end. It is enough to read the line from the synopsis "Andrey Latonin has repeatedly jumped with a parachute, but on the day of the holiday he was scared and stayed in the cockpit" to understand - the scriptwriters did not see a person in the eye preparing for "new records." God be with him, though. And then the most exciting thing begins. It's 1940. The head of the complex expedition, which initially looks like a tour of the lightest category, says that they know nothing about volcanoes! Wow, I told myself! The germs of Russian volcanology can be seen in the descriptions of volcanoes in almost all travelers and researchers of Kamchatka, starting with Krasheninnikov (1755), then Erman (1836), Ditmar (1901) and especially Bogdanovich (1904). By the 40s, the third stage of volcanic research was carried out in the USSR, and since 1935, a continuous study of volcanoes at the Klyuchevskaya station began! The question arises, for what target audience was the picture shot? If it’s for children (soyuzdetfilm), then why do children have “adult relationships”? And if for adults, then how does it all relate to the cowardly parachutist and volcanologists-non-students who climb into the vent of the volcano wearing glasses, but without gas masks! I do not want to accuse one of the founders of Komsomolskaya Pravda, the screenwriter of the film Mikhail Rosenfeld, who died near Kharkov in 1942, of incompetence. Apparently, there was such an absurd order, and this order, by all means, tried to fulfill.
Interesting will be the opinion of the main character Lydia Nikolaevna Smirnova about this picture, told by the actress to readers in her book “My Love”: “And here is the film “An incident in a volcano”. It was originally called Desperate Head. The director was Eugene Schneider... Besides me, Volodya Shishkin and Pyotr Aleinikov participated in the film. A film about an expedition going to a volcano. We are exploring something, getting lost, I have an affair with Aleynikov and Shishkin. Schneider is a very good person, but no director. It's quite obvious. We live in a hotel in Yalta. The eruption of the volcano is filmed on Ai-Petri. A huge iron trough is made, in which we are put, and below, on a cliff, another trough, with mothballs. Naphthalene lights up, flakes the size of burdocks. There's terrible smoke, and we get lowered in the first trough. We, of course, in some jumpsuits, special hats, all sorts of devices for research. When we are lowered, we still tolerate, even though we can barely breathe. And the mothball burns more and more, it becomes fat like oil, falls and smears on the hands, face, body. We get picked up, we come out stunned, suffocated, and we play a scene -- an important conversation. When we come to the hotel, soot and dirt do not want to wash. We also had a scene we were rehearsing in Schneider's room. I was going to the bathroom, I had to hide there and jump out on some line and continue the dialogue. Schneider was sitting at the table, Aleinikov was rehearsing, and I was sitting in the bathroom waiting for a line. Suddenly I hear screams, jump out and see the following picture: an indignant Schneider is sitting, and Petya Aleynikov unbuttoned his trousers and put his “whips” on the table. I gasped, and Petya shouted: "You're not a director, that's who you are!" I don't know, maybe he was drunk, but I don't think he was. He failed, he did not have the patience to listen to the incompetent remarks of the director.
Schneider said that until Aleynikov apologizes, there will be no filming. The whole group goes to the beach, swims, time goes by. Send a telegram to Moscow, in the desk. No one is doing anything, no shooting, and Aleynikov is not going to apologize. Schneider, resentful, sad, humiliated, sits in the room waiting for the decision of the party. Members of the party committee come, sit in a hotel, call Aleinikov, work on him on the first day, demand an apology. Aleynikov resists for a long time and finally squeezes out: “I, of course, apologize, but he is still not a director, but shit.” And he was forgiven so as not to disrupt the shoot. The next episode of The Volcano Incident was filmed on a ship that is supposed to deliver an expedition to the volcano. It didn't work. For the reworking of the script took O. Brick with L. Kuleshov, and then V. Schneiderov, who handed over the production of the film. Filming was moved to Odessa, and again - pshik. The crater of the volcano was built in Moscow, in Likhov Lane, at the studio "Detfilm". But then. In the meantime, we are going to the white steamer Kuban. He has a dented nose, he once crashed into stones. The ship is on the road, we get into the boat and sail to shoot our "genius" film ... & #34; Sometimes the view of the film “from the inside” is much more interesting and meaningful than what was shot “from the outside”. However, although I gave a “gray” assessment, the review still made green – for the sense of almost vaudeville parody, and for the sake of bright, cheerful and extremely resourceful actors.