Baltic History “The Man in the Passage Court” is a television series released on television in 1971. The format is four series per hour.
Again, this is a film from my distant childhood, about betrayal during the Great Patriotic War and the identification of a traitor many years later. Together with the films Conscience (1974) and Without the Right to Mercy (1970), it forms a trilogy of films about war and betrayal. I want to make a reservation that this conditional association of films I made for myself, on the principle of content, time and country of filmmaking, and do not claim the truth in the last resort.
Despite the similarity of the theme, “The Man in the Passage Court” still loses, I think, to both films from the above three in terms of the dynamics of events.
In the Baltic republic, on the street, a member of the anti-fascist underground accidentally meets a former policeman, who after a while is found murdered. An investigator (or KGB employee) comes from Moscow, under the guise of a student looking for jobs, who is promoting this case, looking for a real traitor of the underground.
I would call the cast a star. Here and Vaclav Dvorzhetsky and Nikolai Eremenko Sr., and Viktor Chekmarev, who only cheated in his life, and Irina Skobtseva, the grand-damess of Soviet cinema, and Ivan Pereverzev, very convincingly played the bulldygu-captain, and of course, the Baltic actors are lovely Eve Kivi, Hari Liepinsh and Ents Eskola. Wonderful, I would even say deeply, played the role of a beautiful actress Vera Saranova. But Gennady Korolkov seemed to me too old to pretend to be a student. There are different students.
In general, the film is good, despite the slowness of events. Perhaps it was dictated by filming for a certain format for television, perhaps something else. I am not going to judge, but what is there is. I still recommend this movie to watch. At least in order to plunge into the distant atmosphere of the Baltic States, feel the noise of the sea and hear a soft Baltic accent. I hope you don't regret it. And at the same time, you will find out who is who in the long history of betrayal.
Despite the shortcomings, the evaluation
9 out of 10