The Bolshevik Party, in which the people have invested all their faith, the Bolshevik Party, to which the people give their best people, build a new life, realize the age-old dream of mankind! And anyone who stands in its way, anyone who tries to stop our work, the people will destroy!
About the “Great Citizen” to write difficult, awkward and, to confess frankly, not very pleasant. Not because it’s a bad movie — interesting, but when it comes to evaluating The Great Citizen, its value as an individual piece is extinguished, hidden behind its political significance. In fact, if they talk about the “Great Citizen”, they mostly talk about it as a propaganda unit – and we must honestly admit that it is not without reason.
And we must first outline the ideological position of the Great Citizen: yes, it is propaganda. Yes, it directly states the need to destroy (!) elements hostile to the system. Yes, it shows how a perfectly good leader is trying to remove caricature evil people who, despite the amazing talent of the actors playing them (not a couple of modern Madyanov and Basharov, frankly), are still the offspring of pure evil and do not hide it. And most wonderfully, the script of the film contradicts the ideological message, because — and this is just amazing! — nothing great in the film “Great citizen” the protagonist does not do. In general, he is not even the subject of the situation: he was a bit like one side, a little in the other, a lot – pushed speeches about the needs of the people and the need to fight the Trotskyists ... and in the end, and the rationalization proposals, and the introduction of progressive technologies in production, and even the organization of meetings is not engaged in Shakhov-Kirov, and all other, secondary characters, while the main character, to put it politely, but truthfully, only “trade face”. Dialogues are also contradictory: like Chapaev, but in a more pronounced form, the characters talk their motivations head-on, but how do they do it? While the villains motivate their actions and decisions, justify them, make reasonable claims to the obviously hasty decisions of Shakhov’s associates, the positive characters simply breed noisy demagoguery and cover up the lack of a work plan, the inability to maintain a constructive conversation, the ill-thought-outness of their “genius” proposals, and so on.
And here we come to the main problem of the "Great Citizen" - well, besides the fact that he proposes to kill people for their views differ from the conventional one: it has a very loose and sagging structure. The film-dispute came out as a debate, but not a film. Yes, there is something happening in it, there are some actions, but basically it is just a series of different dialogues that clarify the positions of the characters, but do not help the development of the plot. Of course, a film doesn’t have to be fast to be good, but there is a difference between the smooth and slow rhythm of the work and the four-hour drive over the ears of magnificent, incredible, delightful actors who become... well, a little too much.
And yet, the "Great Citizen" in ours is very relevant. Alas, or fortunately, not in the sense in which it was intended in the days of its creation.