Not a very successful hybrid of melodrama and production novel. The film “Sleepless Night” is the debut in the cinema of Yuri Solomin as a young engineer Pavel Kaurov, who came after graduation to one of the Siberian cities to build a port. All the action in the film takes place on one night, during which the main character recalls the events of the past few months. About how in Leningrad, he fell in love with a girl, and then she came to him in Siberia. About how he, blinded by his passion for this young lady, did not care about his job, which caused an accident at the factory. And then the beloved girl took and married another.
On the one hand, the movie Sleepless Night, of course, is a melodrama, on the other hand, it is a production novel about the harsh everyday life of young (and not so) builders of communism. The combination of these genres often brought success to directors and actors of Soviet cinema. This is not the case at all.
First of all, the performance of actors engaged in leading roles is not at all impressive, but acting skills have always been a sign of the quality of Soviet cinema of the 50s - 60s. And you can't say it's totally bad. The girls are spectacular and beautiful, and Yuri Solomin diligently portrays a young specialist who came to serious construction. However, all this feels a certain playfulness, which when watching the movie prevents you from believing in the sincerity of the main characters. Take, for example, the situation in the registry office, when the hero Solomin forgets his passport at home (and the groom is exactly him!). It would be possible to beat this ridiculous case in a bright comedy key, but actors of another level would cope with this, and the heroes of this film worked here unconvincingly.
Some save the situation actors of the second plan and episodes. Masters of a sufficiently high level of Mercury, Mushrooms, Samoilov and others frankly do not know how to play well. However, here they do not look as good as in their other works. All this suggests the idea of the shortcomings of the script and the director’s miscalculations.
But not everything is so bad - there are beautiful views of Leningrad at the beginning of the film, and the heroic rise of a sunken barge with no less heroic people bathing in cold water. Not bad and the rival of the main character, the leading architect of the city with some at the same time aristocratic and philistine manners.
However, in general, the movie “Sleepless Night” remains quite an average work, interesting only to fans of the work of Yuri Solomin. But here it is better to once again review the “Adjutant of His Excellency”, where the actor just very well managed to create the image of the red scout Koltsov.
6 out of 10
