In a rare feature assignment, tv writer/director George Mendeluk (off the big screen since MEATBALLS III/’86) films a perversely misconceived romantic epic about young Ukrainian love surviving against all odds in the face of forced farm collectivization and weaponized famine ordered by General Secretary Joseph Stalin and his rubber-stamp Politburo. Going for a David Lean/DOCTOR ZHIVAGO vibe (right down to naming the lead ‘Yuri’), the film too insanely out of touch with events to work on any level. Appalling, more on the order of something like ESCAPE/’40, with Robert Taylor rescuing Norma Shearer from a German Concentration Camp. And you know what you’re in for right from the start, once you get past the Ukrainian Happy Valley prologue (colorful customs, costumes, bounty & family pride), all destroyed when Iconoclastic Soviet Cossacks ride in to kill Kulaks & reorder society for the common good. Mendeluk tipping his directorial hand from the very first funeral where he includes a corpse’s P.O.V. shot from inside a closed coffin. (With ‘Golden Hour’ lighting!) And things only gets worse from there. A great tragic story lost in here*; if 10 million dead doesn’t count as some sort of genocide, what could? But this ham-fisted atrocity on atrocities definitely isn’t it.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT /LINK: *Probably unwatchable from any but the greatest of story-oriented filmmakers. Not truly comparable, but Kon Ichikawa’s BIRUMA NO TATEGOTO / THE BURMESE HARP/’56 shows one possible way in to the subject. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/biruma-no-tategoto-burmese-harp-1956.html
CONTEST: It seems beyond the pale to even mention, but Mendeluk steals a story beat from (of all places) the old caper pic, GAMBIT/’66. E-mail us or use Comments Box to name the steal and win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.
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