Finding a Homeland Not always the adventure genre should be considered only in one plane - entertainment. In the film by Anatoly Bobrovsky, the entertainment side is present, but it is far from the main one in the film. There are also criminal and espionage-sabotage components. Overlaid on each other, mixing and intertwining, they convey to the viewer an exciting story about the everyday life of counterintelligence, which an ordinary citizen can see only on the screen. But we must remember that the viewer, due to the specifics of the counterintelligence profession itself, is not shown everything. That is why in some films “about spies”, the negative hero – an outcast and a renegade – looks brighter, more complex, more colorful than KGB employees. This is the case in the film “Man without a passport”. Alexander Ryabich, nicknamed “Gray” performed by Vladimir Zamansky, is a controversial character. By mental complexity, by individual traits of character, he compares favorably with the monotonously correct major of state security Vladimir Alekseevich Bakhrov (Gennady Frolov).
Sharpness and conflict on the one hand, ostentatious kindness on the other - these are two sides of the same personality Ryabich, who has to be constantly on guard, be ready for any surprises and even - to failure. A man without a clan and tribe, a man without a family and a home, purposefully fulfilling the task of the “masters”, Ryabić travels around the cities, but from the outside it looks as if he was running away from himself. But that's exactly what it is. In conversations with Olga Petrovna Goncharova (Lionella Pyreva), he repeatedly returns to childhood memories. At first, it looks like a well-developed “legend” designed exclusively for women’s ears, but closer to the end, Ryabić’s nostalgic words acquire a different subtext. Especially after an episode with a former police officer Pyotr Epifanovic Izmailov (Nikolai Gritsenko). Endowed with an inquisitive mind, prone to analysis and comparison, passed through a terrible “carousel” in the preparatory center, Ryabich begins to assess the daily life of Soviet citizens in a new way. Perhaps one of the young viewers will be disappointed that instead of a capsule with cyanide in the collar of a saboteur’s jacket, the film tells about the life drama of a man long ago torn from his homeland. However, it is this, and not the “spy fenechki” that makes Anatoly Bobrovsky’s painting really interesting – tense, dynamic and full of mysteries.