Simple big people. The last picture in the significant duet of film directors Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, who previously gave the audience a trilogy about the beloved Bolshevik Maxim, continues the important theme of the multinational Soviet people, consisting of the simplest people who perform the greatest feats in times of severe trials. Next, Grigory Mikhailovich will conquer world cinema with the reference adaptations of Shakespeare, and Leonid Zakharovich will take a successful course on Gogol’s legacy. The story concluding their creative tandem initially makes a tilt into production drama against the backdrop of the events of the Great Patriotic War, featuring an evacuated aircraft plant in Uzbekistan. The places are harsh, the time is dashing, skilled workers are fighting in battles, it was decided to launch the machines directly under the open sky and give the Motherland the first aircraft in two months.
The viewer will not see the horrors of the war itself on the screen, but he will fully feel the selfless heroic work in the rear, when the evacuated Leningraders – youth, yesterday’s children, women, old people – and the responsive local population will start production against all odds, literally turning themselves into part of a huge tireless machine working in spite of trouble, because when great grief comes, a person must become even more than him. “Not a step back!” sounded at the front a pledge of victory, but in the rear no one forgot about these words, stubbornly moving to the heights of labor, not sparing himself.
The film is not an abstract production agitation about flesh and blood machines. It is decorated with a generous handful of living characters, filling everyday life with heartfelt stories about people whose fate fell a terrible disaster. The central melodrama about the director of the plant and his lost wife is complemented by many secondary in timekeeping, but weighty vivid images that make a wide coverage of persons whose work has won a common victory. The authors of the picture skillfully insert their heroes into one big mosaic of the people, even with small scenes and short dialogues perfectly revealing the characters and true motives of the amazing dedication of people captured on black and white film tired, dirty, disheveled - absolutely without embellishment, but with beautiful eyes. The main message of the picture lies in the inspiring idea that everyone then had his own grief, which seemed an unbearable burden, driving the once beautiful, healthy and happy crazy, but in comparison with the general scourge, when a person stopped pitying himself, beginning to show sympathy for others, it disappeared somewhere. Funeral letters from the front, ragged stories about the brutality of the fascist invaders, someone’s crippled fate and many other powerful evil simply could not break the spirit, caring for each other with unprecedented pure kindness, so touchingly reflected in the picture. Here it is time to highlight the unusually young on the screen Tatiana Ivanovna Peltzer, who created an amazing deep image, as the quintessence of those very simple people brought to the title of the film, who with labor and mutual assistance overcame all adversity. Outstanding actress is not accidental from the whole huge list of roles singled out this amazing in his immense spiritual kindness, illiterate laundry, subtly reflecting the worldly wisdom of a compassionate woman. She has suffered so much grief that she reeks of tragicomedy, she simply cannot understand the reason for the fierce invasion of “these”, who are all persecuting and persecuting so many people, but is infectiously happy and advises everyone to be so. The people are so good! How lucky she is with them! And it is not by chance that the strongest scene in the whole film is assigned to her, when the director of the plant, saddened by personal and general adversity, kisses her hand tired of washing, as if before him the soul of the suffering people, full of sincere pure kindness and boundless love for life, no matter how much evil there is around.
That is why at first they did not accept the picture, putting it on the shelf, because these simple big people overshadowed the production chronicle of events, pushing the required terms of the first aircraft launched into the sky, designed to disperse all the black clouds to the fore. But after some eleven years and to this day, “Ordinary People” cause concern for their fate and the range of warmest feelings for themselves.