Trojan Horse in Kum Basan-Kala Left – step, right – step: all around – solid sand! The desert is not a trifle either along or across. Inside the desert is a void. She does not do anything either in summer or winter.
It's a totally uncharacteristic spy movie. To the border guards he has an indirect relationship, and only because the violators quite easily managed to cross the border, which raises a natural question to the screenwriter. The plot is simple and simple: special services intercepted a radio session from Karakum. In the ruins of the abandoned fortress of Kum Basan-Kala hidden object (steel shiny box), which hunted agents from abroad. The box in this case is McGuffin - a common term in Western narratology for denoting an object around the possession of which the plot side of the work, mainly the adventure genre, is built. The contents of the box will not be shown to the viewer, but its value will be emphasized repeatedly, so it will only increase.
The film has 2 directors and 2 writers. Perhaps that’s why the film turned out to be extremely confused, confused and inconsistent. Either there was no consensus between the creators, or the reason was that at the stage of editing, the picture was significantly “edited” – timekeeping was only 69 minutes. Anyway, today in the genres of "drama", "detective", "adventure", "spy film", I would add one more - the main one: "art house". I don’t know if it was meant to be that way from the beginning, or if it happened, but the film turned out to be amazingly beautiful visually in a highly controversial and inconsistent script.
The plot constantly “jumps” from one character to another, completely confusing the viewer. The only thing that remains unchanged throughout the picture is the truly amazing camera work. Perhaps a sixth sense allowed Herman Lavrov to capture the real poetry of the desert. Unfortunately, the insufficiently high quality of the film does not allow today's viewer to see all its beauty, but those who watched the tape in a wide box office were much more lucky. It is for this reason that at the First Review-Contest of Cinematographers of Central Asia in Kazakhstan in 1962, German Lavrov received a Diploma for Best Cinematography. Absolutely deserved award, because German Lavrov not only saw the desert through the lens of the camera, he felt it like no other person.