At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among His Own

The civil war has just ended. The young Soviet state is hungry and without money, and the gold collected in the region is to go to Moscow by train. Five old comrades take on the job. The train is robbed. One of them, Shilov, is accused of betrayal and goes after the gold alone to clear himself. Against him are White officers, bandits and his own former friends. Nikita Mikhalkov directs in his first film and plays the bandit Brylov himself. The genre is a western. In Soviet cinema this shape was called an eastern; horse chases, a train robbery and duels are taken from the American form and set into a civil war landscape. The real subject is friendship. The five made the revolution together and now suspect one another; the narrative is about how trust falls apart rather than about ideology. The visual language is very free for its time. The cutting is fast, there are sepia passages and frozen frames, and the music is by Eduard Artemyev. It was received without being fully understood in the Soviet Union and became a cult film later; it is now held to be among Mikhalkov's best. Who it is for: viewers who like Soviet westerns and adventure built on friendship. Who it is not for: the plot is confusing in the first half, the characters are hard to tell apart, and some scenes hang without the historical context.